Step Zero: What you need to do before making a career decision!

Published in

SN Mentoring

3 min readSep 10, 2021

Everywhere you look for guidance or help related to careers, there is an assumption that you know what you’re looking for. You want to study law here are the steps; management — this is step 1 this step 2 and so on; engineering, design, sustainability, job search, veterinary sciences — the story is the same. Everyone assumes that you know what you’re looking for.

Everyone thinks that just some random information on the internet or a story that one of your friends told you about someone else’s career pathway is also going to work for you. And then there are successful people from different domains who will tell you to be open, to keep experimenting, to keep up skilling and so on. But their assumption is the same, that you know in which direction to move forward, that you know which experiments are going to be beneficial and cost effective for you in the long run. When you dig deeper into such advice, you will see that the intentions behind such advice is always positive but there is a general sense which tells you that careers are mostly happenstance, serendipity or putting it more simply, just plain accidents. Is it really? Are careers just a function of chance? A chance where your personality, your aptitude, interests, personal factors and aspirations are nurtured by the right opportunity under the guidance of the perfect mentor? In today’s episode I am going to discuss a step which you need to take before we make any career and higher education decision. The Step Zero!

In this episode, I deconstruct our career decision making and point out the missing fundamental step before making any career decision: self-evaluation.

I also discuss the following:

The Aptitude Personality Interest model of assessment
Personal Factor Assessment and Psychometric assessments
21st century skills, future of jobs, half-life of technology
Agility needed for this VUCA world
Components of getting ready for the future

Listen to the full episode here :

Saurabh has been guiding students and young professionals since 2012 and guided over 20,000 students, parents, educators and young professionals across India, Japan and Denmark. His mentees are working in the top Fortune 500 companies and upcoming startups along with prestigious government positions. His mentees have studied and are studying in the top universities across the world. His mentees projects and research work regularly gets recognised and awarded.

Please visit https://snanda.in/ to know more. Contact SN Mentoring for getting yourself assessed for your future career and education opportunities. If you want to ask questions which Saurabh can answer in the next episode, please email your questions to namaste@snanda.in .

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