It’s the question everyone gets asked throughout their teens (and sometimes beyond): what do you want to do when you grow up? Unless your heart’s still set on becoming an astronaut or captaining your country to World Cup glory, you’ll probably have given it some thought. But how do you decide what graduate career path to start off on? Sally Bibb of talentsmoothie offers some words of wisdom.

Do you know what your passions are? Have you thought about what you are really great at and what gets you excited, motivated and energised?

Knowing the answers to these questions is crucial to finding the right career for you. Careers conversations tend to focus on what you are good at and what interests you. These are important factors to consider but there are three problems with basing your career choice only these questions alone:

• What you are good at isn’t necessarily something that you want to spend your working life doing. You might be a great guitar player but making a career out of it may not be viable.
• Not everyone finds it easy to identify what they are really interested in.
• Being interested in something isn’t enough. The people who love their work feel passionate about it – that’s a few notches up from ‘interested’.

Some people don’t even get as far as thinking about what they are good at and love doing. Instead, they run their finger down a menu of job titles and choose one. It’s a kind of default strategy. They don’t know what they really want to do so they choose something that sounds ok, is a safe choice, is well paid, or all three.

How NOT to choose a career

A young lawyer recently told me that she didn’t know what she wanted to do when she was at university. She was getting good grades and was told that she was bright enough to become a lawyer. Some of her friends were going into law. She didn’t have any other ideas so she thought she might as well do the same.

She has been doing it for several years now and hates it. She feels like she has wasted time on something that doesn’t motivate her. She is doing long hours so her social life is suffering.

She tried moving to a different company, thinking that a new firm would be different. At 11pm on the Thursday of her first week she was texting her friends saying that this was the earliest she had left work and that she had to get out of there!

How to choose the right career for you

The sad thing is that this situation could have been avoided if she had had the right guidance and had asked herself the right questions before she left university. How do you make sure that you end up doing work that you love?

If you are not one of the lucky few who ‘just knows’, then read on:

• Make a list of what you are good at. For example, you might be great with numbers, detail, coming up with new ideas or getting on with people. Write it all down. Ask friends and family what they think you’re good at, too. This is important as we often take our strengths so much for granted that we don’t even notice them. I know someone who is great at asking good questions (a very important skill in many careers). It is so natural to her that she didn’t even realise (a) that she was good at it and (b) that not everyone had that skill, so it was a valuable one that made her stand out.
• Write down what you love doing. Not what you ’quite like’ doing – what inspires you. For example, if you love meeting and finding out about new people, if that gives you a buzz, write it down. If you love following your football team every Saturday, write it down. Don’t just think about work; non-work activities often have elements in them that you can find in a job. And if you have to think about whether you love doing something for too long, leave it off the list – it’s obviously not that important to you.
• Think as well about what’s important to you. Is it to have friends at work, to be constantly learning new things, to feel like you can make a difference, to be free to work without rules, to work in an optimistic environment? Write down everything that is important to you.

How to use your answers to help your career choice

Answering these three questions won’t magically give you the answer to what career is right for you, but it will help you find out what is not right for you. For example, if working without rules is important to you it is unlikely that you will be happy in a law firm; if autonomy is important then the armed forces won’t be right for you.

It will also give you an idea of the sorts of things you need to ask potential employers. For example, if you know you love working on new ideas, but are less good at follow-up, a career in journalism is unlikely to be good for you unless you love writing so much that you are motivated enough to overcome this.

When you talk to potential employers ask them:

• Will I have a chance to use my strengths in xxxx in this job / company?
• I have a passion for xxxx; what opportunities will I have to follow that passion?

The www.tellithowitis.com survey will help you to think through what is important to you. And the results of this survey are being used to educate employers about what the younger generation today want from their work. This is your chance to have your say too.

Sally Bibb is a director and co-founder of talentsmoothie. She writes books and articles on organisational culture, trust and careers. You can contact her at sally@talentsmoothie.com.