Reflecting on Career Choices: I Don’t Know What to Do
What career do I want to do? I have been asked this question for years and still don’t have an answer. The pressure of having your life and career all figured out before you graduate is considerable.
The huge variety of career options doesn’t help, particularly with a Psychology degree.
At the beginning of the short work placement module, I completed the career self-efficacy questionnaire. Completing the career questionnaire was a good start to get me thinking about my mindset towards my future and how it needs to change. The questionnaire related to knowing what options are out there, who to talk to about this, and making decisions about your future. My results suggested a worrying lack of confidence in these areas.
Having no idea what type of career I am interested in is causing me to struggle to take the next step, and move forwards. With Psychology being such a broad degree, it is difficult to know where to start, and I think this is my problem, causing my lack of confidence. Making any definitive decisions is intimidating because I don’t want to make the wrong decision, and feel like I wasted my time.
However, I think I can take some positives from completing the questionnaire. Reviewing questionnaire feedback from the careers service was useful for me when deciding what ‘next steps’ I should take and I have decided to look into marketing myself more effectively, attending sessions offered at the university which allow for interview preparation. This will allow me to feel more prepared. I also plan to think about what actually interests me and research jobs that are related to my interests.
The first assignment to be completed was the CV and cover letter. Having to improve my previous CV from the year before and reflect on what I had done since then to add to my CV made me realise that I need to do more for my future, as not much had changed which I could update. I realised that I don’t feel confident talking about relevant skills and experience, and I lack in this area, partially because I don’t have a clear career goal I am working towards. This makes me feel uneasy and uncertain about the future, so starting to think more seriously about what I want to do as a career is an important next step.
When writing a CV and cover letter again in the future, I plan to make use of the resources available from the careers service. I feel if I had done this at the time, and even booked an appointment with the careers service to look through my CV, it could have been improved more. I didn’t make use of these services at the time because I found the idea of going through my CV with someone daunting, and wasn’t sure about what I had written.
