There are many additional life factors that will relate to your career planning that you should consider. We will discuss only a few of them here.

Life Goals and Dreams

There is some research evidence suggesting that your career dreams can be very helpful with career planning.

• What careers have you ever thought about during your life?
• Should you re-connect with these dreams?
• Is the dream consistent with your needs now?
• Can your life goals help you with your career plans? For example, if you really want to work in a rural community this may impact the possible careers you can pursue.
• Consider going through a career imagery activity like this one.

Life experiences

Your life experiences can be an incredible source of information about your interests, values, personality preferences, aptitude and more. Reflect on:

• any work and volunteer experiences you’ve had and consider what you’ve enjoyed and disliked about the activity.
• the occupations you’ve seen while working or living. Do any interest you?
• The activities you most enjoy doing in life. For example, what types of books do you like to read, what world events attract your attention, what are your recreational interests? Do you enjoy helping coach children’s teams? If yes, maybe you might want a career focused on interacting with children.

Looking for new and different life experiences? University study offers great opportunity to explore and experience new things. You can join a student group, study abroad or attend new lectures/presentations. There always seems to be something happening on campus that you can check out.

Have your past and/or present life experiences been challenging? Looking for help with these? Consider connecting with the Student Counselling and Career Centre’s personal counselling services. Note: these services are only available for current University of Manitoba students. Check out this link to our personal counselling services.

Life influences

Many things will influence your career planning. Some of these things have influenced from the time you were born while others are more recent influences. This can include your family’s values. We recognize that there is great diversity in the world and that this impacts individual career planning. If your culture’s values are important to you, don’t ignore this when career planning! We won’t.