Career Decision Making/Matching:

Now comes the time for you to make some decisions. Align your self-assessment results to career options and choose a career field or job on which to focus your efforts. If you’ve taken the MAPP™, this part will be considerably easier. If you are like most people, decision making can be very anxiety provoking, but all the preliminary work that you have done in steps 1 & 2 should make this process much less so. Here are some tips for narrowing down your options and making some career decisions:

• Identify the decision to be made. This is pretty obvious, in this case, what career field or occupation are you going to pursue?
• Summarize the information you have gathered and/or already know about yourself from your self-assessment.
• Use the preliminary research information you gathered about occupations and the information you already know to list your options.
• Systematically evaluate these options. It helps to write down all the advantages and disadvantages that you can think of. Don’t hesitate to ask family and friends for their input. Be careful not to rule out certain options because of any stereotypes you may have nor rule out options prematurely because of barriers you may perceive.
• Begin narrowing your list by picking the top two or three options you find most appealing. Now you will be ready to take more action. Continue to investigate your choices. Now is a great time to conduct some information interviews.
• Implement the decision, take action.

Keep in mind, when making career changes, that it takes time and energy to go through a career change. But the more effort you invest, the more you will get out of it. Fight procrastination by continuing to take small, manageable steps forward. Don’t try to do everything at once. Don’t try to do it alone. Ask for help from family and friends. Make efforts to manage your stress, especially your fears. If you get "stuck", you might want to seek the help of a career development professional. Don’t expect the process to be easy and straightforward. You will most likely have to retrace some of your steps as you learn more about yourself and specific occupations.