Essential Career Questions

Career planning experts offer a wide variety of guidelines for moving forward in your employment situation.  Use of the following questions can help you develop an action plan for greater career success and personal satisfaction.

1. What do you like to learn?
2. What do you do in your spare time for fun?
3. Are you creating a career for your parents, for society, from your own excitement, or for money?
4. What is your definition of work?
5. What challenge excites you the most in your life right now?
6. What impact do you want to have on other people’s lives or in the world?
7. Do you feel confident that you are exceptional at something?
8. What do you want: more joy or more power?
9. Do you want to be like your parents? Why or why not?
10. What do you do that builds your confidence?
11. How often are you bored
12. Are you proactive about sharing your ideas with your team and managers?
13. Whom do you admire most? Are they passionate and purpose driven by their work?
14. When you make decisions about your career, do you often consider what other people will think of your decision?
15. What advice would you give yourself today about where you are in your career based on where you want to go?
16. What does success mean to you?

For additional information on essential career questions, click here.

Teaching Suggestions

• Have students use one or more of these questions to talk to others about their career planning activities.
• Have students prepare answers to several of these questions to help guide their career planning activities.

 Discussion Questions 

1. Which of these questions are most valuable to you to guide your career planning activities?
2. What are some additional questions that you might ask yourself or others to help guide their career planning?