Selecting a career at this stage is not going to be your final choice. In fact, you will be further investigating dozens of ideas and change your mind several times.
We are not going to show you a simple formula on how to select the career that is for you and strongly advise you to stay away from those that promise you a career based on a simple formula. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. There are some criteria, of course, on how to select your new career, but the final decision is entirely up to you, depending on what you are passionate about, on whether the career is popular, and if the interest is skyrocketing. There are many factors to consider and there isn’t a right or wrong career choice.
In this chapter, we will give you our choice of a career, but this doesn’t mean it’s right for you. What we want to achieve here is to present you with the process of planning and deciding.
Our career selection
We will use this section as one example of our career idea that we selected, to show you what is the planning process to choose a niche for yourself.
In the previous chapter, we have listed 7 trending career ideas within the sport and nutrition specialisation. Whether you are interested in one of them or not, our process is applicable to every new career idea and niche.
So, to recap, these were the 7 trending career ideas we have seen in the previous article:
- Personal Trainer
- Weight Management Consultant
- Nutritionist
- Pilates Classes Near me (for Pilates instructors)
- Gym Trainer
- Crossfit Instructor
- Health and Wellness Coach
In our process, we compare all ideas in Google Trend to find further clues on popularity and demand.
Note: Google Trend cannot replace your due diligence when planning a new career. We are just using it an example of how much demand it is online for a job title.
As you can see, Weight Loss won by far. In second place we got Crossfit Trainer followed closely by Personal Trainer.
So, our career selection will be for Weight Loss and we feel confident this is the right choice. The reason for our choice is that Weight Loss can be applied to several other related disciplines, such as Nutrition, Training, Crossfit and Pilates. Weight loss is one of those benefits of sport and nutrition that everyone on an active lifestyle will see anyway unless you train to gain muscles volumes.
“I am training hard and eating healthy to increase my weight,”
Said no one ever.
The trend for Weight Loss began earlier than 2004 (this is how far Google Trends goes) and it started to increase in 2009 steadily and now in 2018, it seems to have reached its peak of popularity.
Because we want to know more about Weight Loss, we decided to investigate further into this niche and find out more interesting facts.
Let’s select again the Weight Loss trend for the last 5 years. As you can see in the next graph, the trend has been stabilized after exponential growth.
Also, you can see that every January the interest in Weight Loss increases (you see the peaks?). January is the period of the year when people make new years’ resolutions and for many of them it’s time to lose weight. This interest then fades as months go by.
Choosing a specialty
A specialty is simply a subset of the market. For example, some of the specialties of Weight Loss would be these:
- Diet
- Women’s health
- Men’s health
- Weight loss for women
- Weight loss for men
- Fat burners
- Meal replacements
Why is important to choose a specialty? Great question. If you don’t choose one, you will operate in the mass market, which is a crowded place and you are going to compete with much bigger and established companies.
Your specialty will help you define possible service benefits aimed at satisfying specific market needs, the price range for your service and service quality, branding and your marketing.
In this section, we will show you some techniques to use for choosing a career specialty.
Google Searches
If you want to know how your chosen career is being presented and sold online, the best way is to search it on Google and study what others are doing. We will keep using our example of Weight Loss and filter down some niche examples. For the query “weight loss tips” we have found so many specialties:
Google Suggestions
When you start typing something on the Google search bar, it begins showing you suggested searches before you finish typing. Google is completing your thoughts and you can use this to find niches of your new career:
If you want to find more suggestions, you can use the “People also ask” suggestions on Google.
Answer the Public
If you need to find an alternative way to call your new career, you might want to use Answer the Public. It’s a tool built for generating new ideas quickly.
This tool is called just like this: Answer the Public. If you are not satisfied with just a few dozens of niches and you need to find hundreds of them, go all-in with this amazing tool. Just go on the website and start typing the career niche you want to check, in our example we carry on with “weight loss”.
Answer the public will give you related words for “weight loss”, give you questions ideas, prepositions and comparisons.
This is the map we got for the related terms to weight loss:
Personality tests
If you want to know a little bit more about yourself and to see which traits of your personality match your chosen career niche, it’s time to take some tests. Tests cannot tell you exactly what your dream job is, but they surely help in pointing to the right direction.
Here is a list of the 10 most popular quizzes you can take:
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This test gives you an idea of your personality, it’s helpful when you have to assess how you take information, how you make decisions and lots of other useful things. If you work, for example, in Weight Loss, it might be useful when assessing the type of course you like: online, live or practical? Or maybe all of them combined?
- 123Test. Find out more about your strengths and your personality with 123Test, a free quiz that gives you valuable information about your career choice. It contains 120 statements that you can answer in about 20 minutes.
- ColorQuiz. This is a free five minute personality test based on decades of research by colour psychologists around the world.
- Keirsey temperament sorter. This test helps you to understand your personality type and discover what type of temperament you have. Test results suggest a predominant personality type including Artisan, Guardian, Rational, or Idealist that influences career satisfaction, job search strategies, and job performance.
- Redbull Wingfinder. The famous brand Redbull developed this quiz together with experts from the University College London and Columbia University New York to assess strengths, things that you are good at. It takes 35 minutes and gives you 19-pages feedback, with lots of details
Once you know more about yourself and your personality, you can zero in on your career choice.
Conclusion
We hope that by this point you have chosen your new career direction. If not, feel free to revise the trending topics with Google Trends, take more personalities tests and find a new niche to operate in.
Either way, you need to be ready for the next topic: evaluating your career idea.