How to Choose a Career
What every young person should know – and every parent should read
Choosing a career can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re unsure what direction to take. Many young people spend years going back and forth between options, feeling pressure to decide, or worrying they’ll make the wrong choice.
If you’re asking questions like how do I choose a career?, what career should I choose?, or why can’t I decide?, you’re not alone. For some people, career decisions seem to come easily. For others, confidence never quite arrives.
The issue is rarely a lack of motivation or ability.
More often, it’s a lack of career direction and clarity.
This article shares a practical framework for choosing a career when you’re unsure. It’s built around three stages – Attraction, Attachment, and Aspiration – which help you move from uncertainty to a clear sense of direction you can explain and trust.
Attraction
Which careers am I genuinely drawn to?
We are naturally attracted to certain things and not others. This is part of how our brains work. When something truly interests us, it creates mental and physical responses that encourage curiosity, focus, and action.
The first step in choosing a career is learning to recognise what you’re attracted to, rather than what feels expected, safe, or sensible.
Ask yourself:
- Which careers or areas do I keep coming back to?
- When I talk about them, do I feel more engaged or interested?
- What feels instinctively interesting rather than forced?
Careers advisers often notice clear shifts when someone talks about something they’re genuinely attracted to. Their thinking becomes sharper. Their confidence changes. Realising that attraction is something you can feel, not just analyse, can be a turning point.
If you’re considering multiple options, forced ranking can help. Instead of asking “which career is best?”, ask “which am I most attracted to, and why?”
One useful exercise is ranking the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals based on attraction. All are important, but one or two often stand out as areas where you feel drawn to make a difference.
In Scotland, you can also explore the country’s key economic sectors and rank them based on attraction rather than job security or status.
Attraction gives you a starting point. But attraction alone isn’t enough to choose a career.
Attachment
Am I genuinely engaged, or just loosely connected?
Many people research careers they’re attracted to but never properly engage with them. They stay on the outside, gathering information without real involvement.
Attachment is about moving from interest to participation.
Being attached to a career means engaging with its information, opportunities, and people. This might include work experience, volunteering, part-time jobs, projects, events, online communities, or informal exposure that builds real understanding.
Work experience is an obvious example, but attachment often exists in places people overlook.
For example:
- Someone interested in financial services may already be developing attachment through hospitality work involving payments, transactions, and customer behaviour.
- Someone drawn to digital marketing may already be engaging with digital systems through retail, e-commerce, or content platforms.
Strengthening attachment changes how you see opportunities. Experiences that once felt unrelated start to make sense in a different way.
Attachment also tests attraction. As you learn more about a career from the inside, it may become less appealing. That’s not failure – it’s useful information. If that happens, return to attraction and explore something else.
When attraction remains strong as attachment deepens, a genuine career direction starts to form.
Aspiration
Can I clearly explain my career direction?
Aspiration is about articulation.
It’s the ability to explain:
- why you’re attracted to a career
- how you’ve strengthened your attachment to it
- what your realistic next step is
You don’t need a long-term master plan to choose a career. You need clarity.
By practising how you talk about your career direction, you move from vague ideas to specific, believable goals. Writing it down helps. Saying it out loud helps even more. When you can clearly explain your thinking, applications and interviews become more natural and convincing.
It’s also important to remember that careers change. You will change. Industries will change. The Attraction, Attachment, and Aspiration process can be revisited whenever you need to rethink direction, whether early in your career or later on.
How to choose a career when you’re still unsure
If you’re feeling stuck or uncertain about your career, slowing down is often the most productive step you can take.
Career clarity doesn’t come from guessing louder or committing earlier.
It comes from understanding what genuinely pulls you, building meaningful attachment, and forming an aspiration you can explain.
A practical next step
If you’d like to work through Attraction, Attachment, and Aspiration in a guided way, Early Career Pathfinder is a short, structured course built around this exact framework.
It’s designed to help people aged 16–30 slow down, think clearly, and finish with a written statement of career direction they can build on. The course takes under an hour and is intended as a calm starting point, not a forced decision.