http://www.coolercareers.com
Career Change Step 4 - Career Research
Before you make a final decision when making a career change , you will need to do
some detailed career research. This will help you look at the career options available to
you and to work out the different routes you can take to get the qualifications and
experience you need to reach your goal.
General Online Research
This can help you to look at the broad picture and give you some ideas as a starting
point. So you can search for very general themes such as jobs with travel, jobs abroad,
jobs for liberal arts graduates and so on. You could make a list of the roles and
interests you have had and search using those. Examples might be jobs for mothers,
jobs with languages, jobs for sports enthusiasts or jobs relating to cooking or looking
after children.
You could even chose unspecified searches such as "Jobs related to" which at the time
of writing brings back a lot of interesting results. Or you could go for terms directly
related to mid life career change, like "jobs over 40", "careers for older people"or
"careers for introverts" (or extroverts). "Careers for the future" is a good one if you plan
to stay employed for a long time. Make sure you put quotation marks around the terms
so that you get results which are optimized for that phrase. Otherwise you will get a lot
of general results about careers and jobs which aren't relevant to your query.
Specific Online Research
Once you have identified some potential career areas or specific jobs, specific research
is the next step. There are many sites which will help you to understand careers and
what is needed to gain entry to them. Most countries also have government run sites
which provide full job descriptions, along with details of qualifications needed and
prospects within the career. You can also use these sites to find additional careers
which are related to the one which originally interested you.
Offline Research
There are many ways in which you can do some research offline. Job fairs and
c