Am I ready for Work?

My earlier blogs in this series on seeking employment can be found at Robin Cunningham's SharePosts

Last week we looked at the some of the tradeoffs one might want to consider when looking for work. More specifically, we talked about a few of the many potential economic goals one might adopt when seeking employment, as well as the tradeoffs in terms of importance and difficulty these objectives might present. This SharePost can be found at Why Do You Want to Work - Economic Goals - Trade-offs posted on 17 August 2008

I want to emphasize that the goals I present in this series are all fictitious, as are the data. I strongly recommend that you print out a copy of the blank form we used and enter your own goals and then evaluate these as we did in my last blog. [I've produced a completely blank copy of the form we have been using, as well as one with the goals and questions we are discussing now, at the end of this blog for you to print out and copy.] Keep your entries and analyses for review when we complete this series of questions on looking for work. You might be surprised by the final results.
I had planned this week to look at a few Personal Goals one might consider when seeking employment. Carolyn DCROY9633] has already contributed a goal for this analysis. This will be done in due course, but I've decided this week instead to respond to the comment made by Don Fraser concerning my blog of last week entitled - Why Do You Want to Work - Economic Goals - Trade-offs posted on 17 August 2008

Don rightly pointed out that, so far at least, the blogs I've posted on the subject of seeking employment have all assumed that we are on the verge of entering the workforce. But how, Don asks, can we determine whether or not we are ready?

I've given Don's question a lot of thought this week. The decision that you are ready to seek employment is a subjective and highly personal one. Only you can make this decision. IQ tests can't provide an answer, nor can aptitude or personality tests. I've concluded that completing the series of questions that I include in the questionnaire we are building could be of considerable assistance in making this decision if one uses the guidelines set out in my blog entitled - "Finding a Job - Critical Answers" posted on 27
July 2008.

Let's take a second look at the form we worked with last week to see if there's anything, even using just this initial form alone, that will address Don's question -

ANALYSIS:

The first thing of note is the difference in the totals for columns one [IMPORTANCE] and two [DIFFICULTY] is only -4 points. This indicates that the importance of all our goals and the difficulty we anticipate in achieving all these goals is well balanced, even if the difficulty, in our perception, is slightly larger (by 4 points).

Second, in looking at column three [Goal Value], we can see that out of the ten goals we chose, three are perceived to be more important than the difficulty we expect to encounter in realizing these. This suggests that we are ready to pursue these goals.