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You probably spent at least 11 years of your life getting an education. So when your title officially changes from “student” to “unemployed,” it can be a little scary. Even scarier is not knowing what to do with your life. Sometimes we bench learning how to find your dream job in favor of trying to find a job at all.
But it’s never too early to start following your dreams. If you already know your passions and have the necessary credentials to get your foot in the door, here’s how to find your dream job and go after it.
If you’re truly lost, you might need to go to square one. True, career quizzes are a little cliche. But at least they give you a place to start.
The Princeton Review has a good online career quiz, but if you want the real deal, take the MAPP test from Assessment.com.
Also try this career quiz from the Australian government for fun! Take notes, America.
If you already know what industry you want to get into, but you’re not sure what specific job you’d like to pursue, start researching. Princeton University’s Career Services page offers a thorough list of most career industries available in America.
Let’s say you love academia and education, but you don’t want to be a teacher. You go to Princeton’s Career Services, and you notice a sub-category called “Archives / Library” under Education & Teaching.
After clicking a few more links, users get to a page of job listings. Turns out, if someone’s interested in libraries, they could potentially land a job as a Director of Library Information Technology, Electronic Resources Analyst, Bookmobile Operator and a Regional Director who works from home.
It might not seem super exciting to the average person, but it goes to show that no matter the category, there are a variety of options that can fit a person’s goals. And these jobs can lead you to pretty cool places! The Getty Museum, a fantastic educational and cultural hub in Los Angeles, has a listing specifically for an Electronic Resources Librarian. If digital research is your thing, and you love talking about education without actually being responsible for someone else’s education, this could be the perfect job for you.
So start researching! Try to limit your options to a couple of departments, but don’t feel like you need to narrow it down to a single dream job. People can be perfectly happy in multiple positions.
Now that you know what field you want to go into, you need to figure out your work-life boundaries. Answer the following questions:
Would you be happy in a 9-to-5 job?
Would you be able to control your own schedule without risking productivity?
Do you want to travel?
Are you okay with a long commute?
Are you willing to work overtime?
What’s your ideal work environment?
Do you need to like your co-workers, or are you okay without any work relationships?
Are you okay with fast deadlines and high-pressure tasks?
How do you work best?
Where do you want to live?
Do you need a high salary?
Do you need to be passionate about your work?
Are you okay with sacrificing salary for work you love, or vice versa?
For all of these questions, determine which answers are deal-breakers and which answers are tolerable. If a person would ideally like to work from home, but they’re okay with working in an office, they can tolerate that condition if it is not met. If they cannot deal with a long commute, that condition is a deal-breaker.
From your answers, you should probably have six deal-breakers at most and two deal-breakers at least. It’s possible to land a dream job with more than six deal-breakers (my friend recently did it!), but you risk a long session of unemployment. (It took her two years!)
If you don’t have any deal-breakers, that’s fine! But it’s possible that you don’t know exactly what type of work makes you happy. In a few years, you should reevaluate. You’ll probably find that there’s a few things about your work situation that you want to change.
If you’re starting to feel like the department you picked suddenly isn’t your best choice, go back and re-evaluate your options. Maybe take the career quiz again to get inspiration for other jobs in your industry. And if that fails, ask yourself about your strengths and weaknesses. Try to find a job that requires your strengths and isn’t terribly affected by your weaknesses.
After all that research, you finally get to… do more research. Once you narrowed down your ideal work conditions and departments, start going through job listings. Good places to start are LinkedIn, Indeed and Glassdoor. Various websites have industry-specific job listings as well. And if you’re a recent college graduate, your college might be connected to Handshake, which often recruits alumni to partner industries.
I always begin with scrolling through online job listings, but after a while, I try to find listings through specific companies. A few years ago, I was searching through online publications, and I actually stumbled across ENTITY. I emailed them about opportunities, but I ended up filling my summer with another position, and a few years later, I applied again.
After all this, of course, you should ask your family and friends for help. Word of mouth is often the best way to land jobs, so ask them to keep an ear out for any open positions in your field.
But above all, make sure to stay open-minded and avoid limiting yourself to certain brands. Don’t associate a dream job with a dream company. You don’t need to work at Pixar or Dreamworks to be happy with an animation position.
Now that you know how to find your dream job, it’s time to start getting it!
After you racked up a list of available positions, strap in and get ready. The next few months (maybe even few years, if you’re really determined) are going to be a whirlwind of updating resumes, writing cover letters, asking for recommendations, gathering connections and applying like a fiend.
It’s important to know that staying persistent will reap rewards. But if you’re not willing to spend a huge amount of time on landing that perfect job, you either have to sacrifice one of your deal-breakers or start building a more long-term plan.
So don’t feel bad about getting a job in the meantime! And if you get to your dream job and realize that it’s not quite as dreamy as you expected, come back to this list. There’s no shame in starting over and rediscovering yourself. We know you’ll find happiness eventually.
For more career inspiration, check out 21 career paths inspired by Disney classics.
