We spend more than 90,000 hours of our lives at work; let’s make them count! There’s little worse than dragging yourself out of bed every morning to do a job that you hate. It can be demotivating, demoralizing and, frankly, downright depressing. So, how do you grab the working bull by the horns and take control of your career path and find the job you want?

It will take some soul searching and a good awareness of your natural talents, but armed with this information and the following tips and tricks; you should be able to get the job you want in no time at all!

Identify What You Love & What You’re Good At

You’ve no doubt heard the familiar phrase: if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. While this is true, not everyone is lucky enough to find a job they truly love. More commonly, happy workers find one or two parts of their job that light them up and consider the less exciting elements of the profession just necessary evils.

If you’re looking to make an exciting career change for the better, you should consider what your natural talents are (after all, we all like doing stuff we are good at!) and which certain activities get you excited. Do you like talking to people? Do you like working with numbers? Are you good at sales? Finding where your talents and your passions overlap is where you’ll start to see potential job roles emerge.

Immerse Yourself in Your Area of Interest

Once you’ve identified some potential new career avenues, you’ll want to get to know as much as you can about this line of work before making any commitments.

Sometimes, it’s possible to get work experience or an internship to trial the new job role. However, this option isn’t readily available to everyone. Perhaps financially you can’t afford to miss a single paycheck for your work, or you don’t have the right contacts in place just yet. Before even stepping foot in a new place of work, you need to immerse yourself in the world of that profession.

Read books on the topic, follow the big businesses on Twitter, sign up for news updates for that sector or even join a company’s mailing list for up-to-date information. For instance, a law firm newsletter from an informed source, such as Lawbiz, will not only keep you abreast of industry news but will also teach you a lot of what you need to know before the final interview.

Ask for Directions

“Networking” is a phrase that can make people cringe. It feels too forced and unauthentic to some. However, how to network is truly nothing more than asking for directions, and you’ll often find that people are very happy to help.

If you can identify an individual who has the sort of job you think you want, offer to take them out for a coffee so that you can hear their backstory. Gleaning the moves they made to get where they are will help you pave a new step-by-step approach to follow.

Once you break your job aspirations down into easy to achieve goalposts, you’ll find it quicker and easier than you thought to get the job you want.