Are you happy in your career choice? Many persons aren’t and as a result they end up performing below standard and in some cases losing their jobs. In these tough economic times, anything that can result in you losing your employ is something which should be addressed as soon as possible.

There are countless career choices out there for you, how do you go about making a choice if you don’t know what you want to do? This is something which even those who have degrees are left to ponder at times. If you have problems choosing a career path which suits you then you can just follow the following steps.

The first thing you need to do is to assess yourself, know what your values are (yes they matter), interests and skills you have to offer as well as the personality traits which you have to go in conjunction with these skills. If you would like to you can use a variety of assessment tools (career tests) which are offered online.

Now that you know what you have to offer, find out what attracts you career wise and make a list of these occupations which you will be exploring. The list should be relatively short, anywhere between five and ten options is good. This list is your occupations which you need to explore.

The next step is to explore the occupations on your list by checking out any job descriptions and requirements, chances for advancements, salary and outlook.

Next conduct informational interviews. Its best to do this at this point because at the end of every step you should have shaved your list a bit so now you only have a couple choices left and you can go a little more in-depth with these by speaking g with persons in the industries. These informational interviews should help you to decide if these careers are indeed for you.

Based on what you have learnt up this point you should now be able to cut down your list and only have one occupation that you want to pursue. Before you can go out and do this then you need to set some goals.

Write a career action plan after setting these goals and figure out how you will reach each of them. This plan will act as a guide so you can pursue your long and short term goals in good time.

In this quest to get into a new career you may need to learn a new skill or two, pursue a degree or do an internship, all which will look better on your resume and result in your living a more professionally fulfilling life.