To find success in the business world, you have to find a role that exploits your most developed personal and professional skills. While matching professional skills with a job description is fairly intuitive, it’s much more difficult to determine which job positions can highlight your strongest talents and qualities.
Are you relish the uncertainty of entrepreneurship or do you prefer structure and security? Do you find it easy to manage people and motivate them to follow your instructions? Or do you struggle with communicating your expectations?
If you want to discover where in the business world you could make an impact that fits with, rather than works against, your strengths, here are a few helpful strategies to consider.
Engage in Critical Self-Reflection
The key to finding personal and professional fulfillment is self-knowledge, which you can achieve via critical self-reflection. This simply means to turn to yourself and analyse your skills, qualities, vulnerabilities, preferences and passions. The better you understand yourself, the better career decisions you can make.
Maybe the idea of being an entrepreneur is attractive to you, but does the lifestyle of an entrepreneur match your lifestyle preferences? This is an example of self-inquiry you have to perform. Look at your previous experience in the workplace. Why do you think some roles suited you better than others? What are your hobbies? How much do you value work-life balance? All these questions should help you to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses.
Establish Professional Goals
If you’re thinking of starting a business, there must be something you want to accomplish by following this path. Do you have a vision for a product or service that you want to bring into the world? Do you want to implement other people’s ideas because you enjoy reaching practical results? Do you have a mission or just like the fast-paced, challenging nature of the business environment?
Most people who succeed in business identify as either a thinker or a doer. Rarely someone can be both. An exception is the INTJ Personality Type. A person with INTJ cognitive preferences is both an innovative visionary and an action-oriented planner able to turn their ideas into reality through step-by-step logical strategies. Most people, however, are somewhere on the spectrum between thinking and doing. When establishing your professional goals, decide where you fit between planning and implementation.
Research Job Responsibilities
If you aspire to start your own business, start franchising or seek a skilled job position in business, a good starting point is to research the range of tasks and responsibilities for each position. Day-to-day life as a manager can be very different from the daily life of an entrepreneur.
As an entrepreneur, your tasks during an average working day can vary greatly. From negotiating with business partners and suppliers to planning long-term goals, you have to use different skills and abilities throughout the day. Research is important because it can help you assess whether you would be comfortable accomplishing the tasks associated with your desired position.
Be Ready to Explore Options Directly in the Workplace
Finding the business role that best suits your personality can be a long and intricate process. As important as self-knowledge and research would be, nothing beats real-life experience when it comes to testing your assumptions. The easiest way to strengthen your self-confidence and to eliminate doubts about your place in business is to get first-hand experience in the workplace.
Many professionals in the business world pivot from one role to another. The reality is that it’s difficult to tell where your talent can be best put to use because the same position can come with different expectations and responsibilities depending on the size of the company, reputation, industry and other factors. Thankfully, many skills are transferable.
For entrepreneurs, the experience can also vary immensely depending on the profile of their business, capital, number of employees or market competition. Not every business needs a visionary able to invent a new product or service. Some businesses thrive by fulfilling basic needs and have no claim on originality.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, don’t believe that there’s some innate quality that guarantees success on this path. Every skill and quality can become an asset for an entrepreneur. The important thing is to find a business niche that matches your expectations and needs your specific strengths.
Conclusion
If you want a career in business, be persistent and treat every job position as a learning opportunity. The more you cultivate your innate skills, the more prepared you will be for your dream role.