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The professional aim

The first of everything consists to the occupation in which it is wanted to work being clear. In this way, the search of work will be able to start with more guarantees of success.

THE PROFESSIONAL AIM

This document helps you to define and/or set your professional aim, in other words, what you want to do.

When you start to search for a job it is essential to be very aware about which posts to occupy. Each person has personal and professional abilities and skills that make him or her more appropriate to carry out a certain type of work.

Defining the professional aim will avoid unnecessary efforts and may frustrations when searching for a job.

All occupations have certain requirement to be developed. Even those that same apparently simple involve knowing and mastering certain procedures, tools, materials, etc., accepting certain work conditions (schedules, environment, …), having certain abilities and skills more developed than others, certain personality or physical features, etc.

During the search for employment it is important to know what sort of jobs we are willing to accept or reject, and what the reasons for these decisions are. Due to this fact we have to specify the occupation in which we are going to search for a job, and therefore know our professional aim: a job suitable for our personal and professional characteristics.

The professional aim is the "ideal" job for each person. It helps us to define a professional project, which is basically the strategic plan to achieve our professional targets.

Having certain professional aim at a certain moment in time does not mean that it can not change. It is possible to find out that your chosen occupation is not ideal after a certain period of time, and this is when you can decide to change your aim or adapt it to the new circumstances.

Neither does it mean that you can not take temporary jobs that are not related with your professional aim. Many times, economic needs make it unavoidable to take the first job that pops up, but this situation is not incompatible with carrying on searching for our ideal employment.

The time that we take to define our professional aim must be seen as an investment which will show results in the near future, since it will increase the efficiency of each step we take in the labour market.

The knowledge of the area's labour market and the behaviour of the occupations are essential to be able to make a decision regarding our professional aim.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

The personal process of searching for employment will gain if the candidate investigates and obtains an objective knowledge of his or her personal interests, skills, abilities and competences.

It is convenient to know "how I think I am" and "how other people see me".

Usually the perception that wez have of ourselves is quite distant from the image that we transmit to other people. That is why it is important to obtain this information in order to act in consequence.

To do so, it will be very helpful if we could find answers to the following questions:

• What do we want? (interests and motivations)
• What can we do? (skills, attitude, training, experience)

Knowing one self beyond what you want o be or what we would like to do, searching for what we really are, will finally lead us to find our professional profile, the things we can provide to the labour market.

MAKING DECISIONS

When the personal and professional knowledge stage ends, and the person already has information on the characteristics of the labour market and its competence demands, it is the moment to make a decision regarding his or her professional future and to specify his or her short, medium and long term professional aims, basing him or herself on the results of the reflections and self analysis carried out up to now.

It is essential that the decision making process is carried out taking into account both the factors that are inherent to the person and the those that conditions the opportunities to access and remain at a job and the time that it takes to achieve either alternatives.

From the moment that you are convinced about the occupation you wish to work at, you can start searching for employment with full guarantees to succeed.