Hey everyone in Kelowna and beyond! I’m kicking off a fresh series on career counselling to empower you in navigating your professional journey with confidence. In this first instalment, we are focusing on self-assessment the essential starting point that sets the stage for meaningful and relevant career decisions, especially in our growing regional job market.
Why prioritise this step? Without a deep understanding of your strengths, interests, values, and even your personality traits, career choices can feel like shots in the dark, leading to dissatisfaction or frequent job hopping. In Kelowna, with booming sectors like tech, services, tourism, agriculture, forestry, and green industries.
Knowing yourself helps you better align with local opportunities, or can better prepare you to make a move elsewhere to pursue your passions and interests.
Here Is A More Detailed Guide To Gaining That Clarity:
Reflect on Your Passions and Motivators: Take time to list out 5 to 7 activities that truly energise you and make time fly by. Analyse the underlying skills involved for instance, if you thrive on organising community events and being around people, you might excel in roles like event planning, project management, or even HR coordination to name a few.
Reflect on your values: It is important to consider what values drive you, such as creativity, stability, or helping others, freedom, fast or slow pace of life.
If this seems overwhelming, and you don’t know where to start, there are incredibly detailed and completely free resources out there that can help you assess your strengths, interests, skills, and values from the government of Canada and WorkBC linked in the description below.
- https://www.jobbank.gc.ca/career-planning/quizzes#personalityQuiz
- https://careerdiscoveryquizzes.workbc.ca
These free resources can uncover hidden talents, such as leadership potential or analytical prowess, providing data backed insights to inform you about yourself, and get started on a worthwhile path.
Journal your professional wins, frustrations, and look for patterns: Look back at your last few jobs or experiences jot down what moments made you feel accomplished (e.g., solving a complex problem in a fast paced environment) versus what drained your energy (e.g., repetitive admin tasks).
This exercise helps identify patterns, like a preference for collaborative environments over solitary work. Reflecting on these lived experiences can provide a wealth of real-world and personally relevant information to yourself and can help inform you toward opportunities that align with your interests, skills, and values.
Dedicate 30 to 45 minutes this week to a dedicated career audit session use a notebook or online document to help with organization.
Thank you for taking the time to prioritize yourself.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Exploring Options: Research and Skill Building
Written by Tim Lamont C.C.C
