Knowledge

What you know determines what work you are qualified to do. Your spheres of knowledge provide avenues for you to apply your talents and skills. However, you must consider your passions as well as what you know. Ideally, these two things will overlap, but enthusiasm trumps knowledge, because you can acquire the later with the former.

Take inventory of your knowledge. Include areas in which you have limited expertise, but are interested in. There are multiple ways you have gained knowledge, such as school, training courses, conferences, books, volunteering, hobbies, TV, practical experience, and on the job training. Try writing a few areas of knowledge from every avenue you can think of. Examples would be things like engineering, gardening, event planning, education, budgeting, negotiating, photography, video production, carpentry, coaching, cooking, or ancient Japanese sword making. You may need to break topics you know a lot about into smaller categories.

Once you are satisfied with your inventory of knowledge, rank the list. Order the items by how excited you are about each one. The items at the top of the list combine your knowledge and enthusiasm, which makes these things key to discovering what you want to do with your working life.

Do not be discouraged if the spheres of knowledge at the top of your list appear to have no connection with one another. A little research may reveal possible connections you had not anticipated. The idea is to begin to focus on areas where you enjoy employing your skills and where you have something to offer.

Combining your values with knowledge and enthusiasm is the underpinning of a dream job. Values and knowledge are the high level influences that direct you towards certain types of work and away from others. Once you have developed an understanding of these two aspects you can begin to work out the finer details about a job you will enjoy.

There are two major components to finding a job you desire. The first is determining what you want and the second is what you have to offer. You have created the framework for both of these by writing down your values and knowledge. In upcoming posts we will delve into the details of these two areas.