Skills, interests and market: the three-circle test

You will be able to check a career direction against your skills, your interests and what employers pay for.

Ask people how they chose their current job and most will tell you a story about timing. A friend knew someone. The first offer came in. The course they studied pointed one way and they followed it. There is nothing wrong with that, but it means a lot of careers are built by accident, and people only stop to think about direction when something goes wrong.

This course asks you to think about it on purpose, and it starts with a simple test. A direction worth pursuing sits where three things overlap: what you are good at or could get good at, what you find interesting enough to keep doing on a bad week, and what employers in Singapore are actually paying for. Miss any one of the three and the plan tends to fail in a predictable way.

Take the first two without the third. You are good at something and you enjoy it, but few employers hire for it, or they pay much less than you need. Plenty of people discover this after a career switch course, when the jobs they trained for turn out to be scarce or junior. Interest and skill are necessary, but the market decides whether you get paid for them.

Now take skill and market without interest. You can do the work and there are plenty of openings, so you take the job. It pays well enough. Three years later you are tired in a way that a holiday does not fix, and you are looking for an exit without knowing where to go. This is the most common story among people in their late twenties who feel stuck.

The third combination is interest and market without skill. This is the gap most people can close, and it is where Singapore's training support is most useful. You will look at SkillsFuture and Workforce Singapore programmes later in the course. For now, notice that a skill gap is a project with a timeline, while a missing interest or a missing market is much harder to fix.

So start with an honest inventory. For skills, list what you can do that other people ask you for help with, at work or outside it. Be concrete: building a financial model, calming an upset customer, running a project with five vendors. Job titles are not skills. For interests, look at what you do when nobody is asking, what you read about on your own time, and which parts of past jobs made the hours go quickly. For market, you will need data, and the next module shows you where to get it. At this stage, a rough sense of which roles are being advertised is enough.

You do not need to find one perfect answer. Most people end up with two or three directions that pass the test, and the job of the next few modules is to check them against real evidence. A direction is a working guess you can test cheaply, by reading job ads, talking to people who do the work, or trying a short project, before you spend money or quit anything.

Be suspicious of advice that skips one of the circles. Follow your passion ignores the market. Go where the money is ignores interest. Just upskill ignores whether you will like the work once you have the skill. Each is a third of the picture.

Your task for this lesson is to draw the three circles on a page. List at least eight skills, five interests and five kinds of role you have seen advertised. Then draw lines between items that connect across all three circles. Any role you can link to both a skill and an interest is a direction worth testing in the modules that follow.

Draw the three circles, list at least eight skills, five interests and five advertised roles, and link items that connect across all three.

Course

• Career strategy: CVs, interviews and networking in Singapore