by Sarah Le-Fevre

Created on: November 03, 2009

How to identify a job you'll love

1. Ask yourself what you love to do

This is the most important step. If you compromise here, you may get a job you quite like or a job you can tolerate, if you're lucky, or another job you hate. Don't limit yourself by thinking about what is possible or what it will pay. That will all come later. This is about painting a picture of you doing what you love.

Write a list of all the things you love to do. Include hobbies, pastimes and other leisure activities too. You might find it useful to use these kinds of categories to help you to create your list. Other possible categories might include 'physical activities', 'mental activities' or 'social activities'. Daydream a little, remembering times when something really made you feel you were 'in the zone'. This feeling of flow is an indication of doing something you enjoy and which enriches your life.

Use a big sheet of paper. Use pens you like using. Use lots of colour. Draw pictures if you want. All of these things stimulate your brain to work as an ideas factory and will ensure that you get as many of these enjoyable activities listed as possible.

This advice applies to all of the following steps where you are asked to make a list. Find a method which works for you and use it. For example, some people like to 'mindmap', while others like to use index cards or sticky notes.

At this stage, you may have an unwieldy list of dozens of different or you may just have five. If you have five, you can stop here. If you have dozens you will need to prioritise them. One way to do this is to compare each activity with every other activity and mark which you like to do best. A sheet of squared paper will help. Give each activity a number and write these numbers along the top of the sheet and down the side. Each square in your grid represents an intersection between two activities. Compare them by writing the number of the one you prefer. If you are not sure what this looks like, think of the mileage calculators at the front of road atlases. This should have a similar triangular shape. You could also do this using a spreadsheet.

When you have filled in all the squares, total up all the 1s and 2s and so on. The number with the highest frequency is the number of your favourite activity. Note down your top five.

2. Ask yourself about your skills and strengths

Now you need to do a similar inventory of your skills and strengths. Skills are things that you can do e.g. using MS Excel to an advanced

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