by Richard Lloyd Evans

Created on: March 28, 2010   Last Updated: November 23, 2010

With hundreds of career choices, looking at making important decisions about your future can seem daunting. How do you make decisions about your career path that makes the most sense for you? One technique that can be very helpful is doing a SWOT analysis to help put your abilities in focus with the job market. Let’s talk about how you can use a SWOT analysis to plan a career.  

SWOT is a simple yet very powerful tool that is used for a variety of reasons in business. SWOT itself is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It allows you to look at internal factors (you) along with external factors (the job market) to make a “snap shot” picture of how you fit in the “big” picture. First, we’ll take a look at the four elements of the SWOT, and then talk about how you can use it to help determine your career path.  

Strengths  

In strengths you look at yourself. What experience and training do you have, especially any that set you apart from others? What are things you do well? If someone asked you in a job interview, “What are your best qualities?” what would you say?  

Weaknesses  

We all have weaknesses, what are yours? Do you lack experience? Do you have problems keeping organized? Are your math or writing skills poor?  

Opportunities

Here we look at opportunities in the job market, both in areas that have expanding job growth, or those that simply have a shortage of workers, especially going into the future. For example, if you are thinking about becoming a teacher, Special Education, Science and Math teachers are in huge demand and have seen constant shortages even with government incentives.  

Threats

Under threats we look at those areas where problems could develop for our potential career paths. For example, following up on education from opportunities, current trends have governments requiring teachers to have higher levels of education, and making licensing more difficult. Another example of this is the reduction in factory production jobs over the past several decades, as technology and off shoring has reduced these types of jobs.  

Now that we know what the four areas are, let’s look to how to use them.  

Brainstorm

The first part is simply sit down and start listing everything about a certain area. For example, under Strengths you should think of every positive aspect about you and list it. Don’t worry about how good or

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