How can I gain the right experience to help me decide which career is right for me?
SEEK’s Resident Psychologist discusses with host Kyran Wheatley the big question of deciding what career is right for you and how to gain the right experience.
Read the transcript
Kyran: Isha has a question here: “I don’t have any experience”. That’s a big start to a question isn’t it?
Sabina: It is.
Kyran: “I don’t have any experience and I’m confused about where to start or what career direction I should take. Can you help?” A big wide question there.
Sabina: It is a big wide question. The first thing I would say to that question is - what is it that gets you up in the morning?
Not a career. Not what job you want. I’m not asking those more specific questions. I’m asking about what is it that makes you tick? What is it that you talk to your friends most about? What do you, in all the time that you have, what are the issues, what are the topics that you choose to talk about? Because these questions start to illicit our own interests. Our genuine interests.
And then once we have a sense of what gets us up in the morning, what we talk to our friends about, what our values are, we can start to make sense of what it is that we want to do with our time, in our working lives. So it’s a reverse way of thinking “I want to be a fireman”, “I want to be a ballerina”. No, I want to dance or I want freedom or I want flexibility or I want to help people or I want to impact lives.
That’s where we need to start in order to narrow down our choices and then, of course, we need to explore what we need to get there in the way of education. But I think that’s secondary.
Kyran: And the thing that we sort of saying a couple of times here is that it’s not necessarily about a job, it’s about what you enjoy doing and then finding a career that fits that.
Sabina: And of course, I’m a realist. I’m not suggesting that you say “I love this and I’ll make it happen and manifest it and put it out to the world”. It’s not that. But I think sometimes we’re too rigid in thinking about a job and the boundaries that are around it instead of thinking about what we can bring to different opportunities.
Ends