3 ways to control your career

It can often feel as though your working life is something that you don’t have as much control over as you’d like. Knowing that you must work for a living can make the entire thing end up feeling more like an obligation, rather than something that you have any natural ambitions tied to. However, looking into how you can change this, and exercise an element of control over the direction of your personal life, can drastically alter how you perceive this aspect of your life.

The ways that you can take better control over your career might depend on what you ultimately want to do, so that’s something worth understanding simultaneously. 

Freelance Work

Perhaps when you think of being your own boss, two possible options come to mind. One is to lean into freelance work, choosing the work and hours that suit you so that you manage your own time and the balance that you maintain. There are many different fields that you can choose from here – a graphic designer or video editor might look to offer their services to various online businesses in need, while carpenters, roofers, or landscapers would be looking to more physical destinations. There is also the option of shipping work, which can allow you to be your own boss by selecting the loads and routes that make the most sense to you, and figuring out how they fit into the greater scheme of things.

Start a Business

The other approach that you might have in mind could be to simply start your own business. In many ways, a lot of the skills that were mentioned previously are relevant here for starting a business too, but it might take a lot more know-how than simply that of the field you’re entering. Starting your own business takes a great deal of adaptability, organization, and financial awareness. Additionally, you must know how to work with people, especially in an employer to employee kind of way, as that’s likely something that you’ll end up encountering at some point down the road.

This option won’t be for everyone, but it might also be something that you’ve simply assumed wasn’t for you without looking into it much more closely and making sure.

A Clear Path

However, starting your own business might seem like a more extreme and all-consuming approach to exercising control over your career. It might be that you simply need to think about the kind of work that you enjoy doing (outside/remote/social/alone/etc.), whittling your options down to a few candidates, and then figure out the steps that you need to take to get there. This might even incorporate elements of experience that you already have to make any possible career shift as easy as it can be, but it can also draw your attention to certain qualifications or training that you might need to make you as viable a candidate as possible.

Having a plan in this regard can make your next professional steps much more exciting and confident, which might be all you need to see it through.