This activity is for groups or individuals facing or desiring career change, especially a move into self-employment or starting up their own new business.It's a simple formula - at a glance:your passion or passions + your strengths and your preferred working style + some research + shape it all into something that people want + time to grow and develop = your new career or business, your independence and security1. List your passions. In no particular order or structure - passions are what you love and enjoy, and will tend to be things that you are good at. Everyone loves and is very good at something, and generally two or three things. Keep an open mind when you consider your own passions. It is possible to make a new career or business out of anything. Passions are not necessarily related to conventional work and how we imagine work to be, and yet every passion can be a career or a new business. A hobby is often a passion. A yearning or lifelonging is often a passion. Get feedback from positive friends about your own passions, especially if your confidence is at a low ebb. Everyone is fantasticat something, or potentially so. A passion (or combination of more than one passion) is the root of a truly successful new venture - be it a career change, becoming freelance, or starting a new business.2. List your strengths. Strengths are your preferred working styles, including the way you prefer to connect with people. Measure your Multiple Intelligences and your VAK style, to see your basic strengths and working style preferences (e.g., inter-personal, or numerical, or words and language) which will indicate your most natural and effective type of work and ways you can do and provide the work. Get feedback from positive friends, especially if your confidence is at a low ebb.You experience (including hard knocks and tough times), your knowledge, skills and attitudinal strengths are all part of your strengths3. Combine your of passion(s) and strengths. Look for combinations which could work together to produce an offering that people want or need, in a way that you can provide it enjoyably. Mix and match your passions and strengths to create combinations which would work together as products or services, or a special expertise which others might need. Brainstorming is very useful for this stage of the process. Allow possibilities time and space to emerge. Do not let finance be an obstacle. It is possible to start most things on a small experimental scale with very little money. Time and commitment are far more important than financial investment. If there are some missing pieces (for example a qualification or vital bit of knowledge or training) use the goal planner. Use the goal planner anyway if you like to see organised elements and a timeline. Project management methods are helpful for people who prefer a structured or strongly planned approach. Other people prefer to work more intuitively, which is fine. You probably will not be able to decide and confirm exactly what you will be doing, and for whom and how, at this stage. Aim simply to come up with a shape of a new direction or offering, or set of ideas that excite you.4. Research - investigate the potential for your ideas and possibilities above. Consider the best 'route to market' as well as the demand and values aspects. 'Route to market' includes in this context whether your offering is best provided via an employed position, or as a freelancer, or via a shop or office, or via the web, or other method of delivering what you have to offer, to the people who want it. Ask friends. Look on the web for existing similar offerings, and for demand. Begin to imagine how a product or service could be provided and within what sort of business or financial model - basically how you'd monetise the provision - make money from it - which can be done in very many different ways. This process is just as useful for career change for employed work, as it is for breaking out as a freelancer or starting your own business. Crucially your research must give you confidence that the basic financials are viable: that there is demand for what you will be doing or providing; that the costs of provision do not exceed the price that people will pay or the revenues which can be generated from the activity. Be creative about the ways that revenue can be created. This website, for example gives everything away free, but due to its high traffic levels produces revenues via advertising, which is an effective financial model for many web businesses. Freelancing with several clients is often a much better way to derive income from a specialised personal offering than conventional employment. Some consumer offerings are better supplied via mail order, or door-to-door; other ideas are better suited to a shop, or a rented office. This is all part of the research: exploring and considering the best ways to deliver your offering. And remember that even if you stay within the world of employed work, you will work more enjoyably and profitably if you think and act like a supplier. The most successful employees behave like a business.5. Time to grow and develop. Consider and decide how quickly you need to implement your plans. Any worthwhile change usually takes time. Even if you have a lot of money to invest in a new business start-up, or some working capital to get you started in self-employment of some sort, time is crucial for refining and developing your offering, and for establishing yourself. That's why is useful to start now. A substantial new business can be built in five years easily. Google had achieved world dominance in ten. Self-employment takes two years to get properly established. A shop can open in a matter of days, but it takes many months to become established, no matter how much money is spent on advertising. This website took ten years to build. But it cost me nothing - just time. Think how you will feel if you are still in a job you hate in five years. Five years is enough for virtually any sort of career change. If you have plenty of time, start now, and your costs will be very low. Change costs more when it needs to be rushed. Given time you can start any sort of consumer business from home on a budget less than your weekly bar bill. Give up a holiday or two, and that's easily enough to start a small business. A small business, built on someone's passion(s) and strengths quite soon becomes a big business - enough for your personal security, independence and your pension. Time is no problem if you start now. Time also helps ideas to become polished into real gems. If you have a passion to work for yourself one day, or to start your own business, don't wait until you are forced to do it. Start it now in your spare time. A couple of hours a week would get you started. Then once you are started, your project has a life of its own and will pull you along with it, provided of course that you love and enjoy it. Again refer to the goal planner and if necessary the project management and business planning content, and any other relevant materials and tools here. That's what they are here for.6. Your new business - this is you - working in whatever way is most appropriate and fulfilling for you, specialising in your passion, using your natural strengths - whether employed, self- employed or running your own business.Visualise it and write it here.Believe it and commit to making it happen.Refine it constantly as it develops.Give it time and space to grow.Enjoy building it.Start now.Start very small if you like.But start now.People going through this process will mainly or eventually tend to end up working for themselves or running their own business. That's not to say you will start off like that, especially if you are young, when it is very helpful often to get your experience and establish contacts by working for an employer. The crucial point, whatever your work status, is to carve out a special value and independence for yourself that puts you beyond the whims of the employment market and uncaring employers. Certain people are always in work that they enjoy and are satisfactorily rewarded for. This is because they are doing something that they love and which they are brilliant at, which allows them to behave very independently. This option is available to everyone, and its value to the individual is greater than any pension fund.Author Unknown. Excerpts taken from Businessballs, a free ethical learning and development resource for people and organizations, run by Alan Chapman, in Leicester, England.
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