Choosing Your Career Path, How to Find Your Way When You Still Do Not Know What You Want

At a career planning workshop in Alexandria, a young man named Youssef raised his hand at the back of the room and said something I still remember today.

I studied commerce, Mr. Mahmoud, and I only got in because my grades took me there. I do not like accounting, and I honestly do not know what I like. What should I do?

A few people laughed, but almost half the room was nodding. Youssef was not only asking for himself. He was asking for most of the people I met in the workshops and free awareness sessions I gave in Alexandria, Cairo, Port Said and the Red Sea. Smart, hardworking young people whom nobody had taught how to choose a career. They spent their study years on subjects they did not choose, then found themselves facing a job market without knowing where to enter it.

I understand this question well because I lived it. I studied tourism and started my working life as a computer and network maintenance technician in Damanhour, then worked as an accountant in a shop and as an administrative assistant in a small office in Alexandria, before I discovered HR and settled in it, then added marketing and business development. The road was not a straight line, and nobody drew the map for me. That is why I am writing this guide, so you can skip the years I spent on trial and error.

In this article I explain how to approach choosing your career path in a practical way, away from the advice to follow your passion that you hear everywhere and never know how to apply. You will find clear steps, real examples from Egypt, and questions to answer for yourself before you decide.

Why young people struggle to choose a career

Before we talk about the solution, let me explain why you feel confused in the first place. The confusion is not proof that you lack talent or direction. It is the natural result of three causes that come up in almost every workshop.

The first cause, you chose your studies by grades, not by choice

The university placement system puts most students in faculties they did not really choose. A student enters commerce, arts or law because their grades took them there, then spends four years trying to love what they study. On graduating, they assume they must work in their field, or the study years were wasted. That is a wrong assumption I will come back to shortly.

The second cause, you do not know which jobs exist

Ask any student about the jobs open to graduates of their faculty and you will hear three or four answers at most. Accountant, teacher or bank employee. Yet today's job market has dozens of roles they have never heard of, such as talent acquisition specialist, data analyst, customer experience specialist, ad campaign manager and project coordinator. You cannot choose from a list you cannot see.

The third cause, family pressure and comparison

Your cousin got a job at the bank and earns well. Why not do the same?

Most of us have heard this sentence in one form or another. The family does not mean harm. They are trying to feel reassured about you in the way they know. But comparison makes you choose a path that suits someone else, and years later you discover it does not resemble you.

The follow-your-passion myth, and what to follow instead

The most common advice you hear when you ask about your future is to follow your passion. It is nice advice, but it assumes you already know your passion and that the market pays for it. Most young people I meet do not know their passion yet, and that is completely normal.

What I have learned from my own experience and from the people I have trained is that passion rarely comes before the work. It usually comes after it. I did not know I loved HR before I worked in it. All I knew at the start was that I felt at ease solving a problem between two people, and enjoyed turning administrative chaos into a system. With time and mastery, that work became part of me.

So I suggest replacing the question of what you love with three sharper questions.

1. Which activities make time pass without me noticing? I do not mean what you like to watch, but what you like to do. Organizing things, persuading people, analyzing numbers, helping others or making something with your hands.
2. What do people always ask me to do? If your friends turn to you to write a post, fix a computer problem or organize a trip, that points to a skill you have and do not see.
3. Which problems does the market pay to have solved? This is where an interest moves from a hobby to a real career.

Where the answers to these three questions meet, you are very close to the path that suits you.

Five practical steps to choose your career path

These are the steps I use with young people in career guidance sessions, ordered so you can start them today.

Step one, write an inventory of your skills

Take a sheet of paper and divide it into three columns. In the first, write the skills you learned in your studies. In the second, the skills you gained from any job, training or student activity. In the third, the skills other people credit you with. You will be surprised by how much you know.

When we did this exercise with Youssef, he discovered he had organized every trip for his class. He negotiated prices with bus companies and hotels and collected fees from a hundred students. The young man who said he did not know what he liked had been practicing negotiation, organization and money management for years without naming them.

Step two, explore the jobs you do not know

Go to LinkedIn and job sites and look up graduates of your faculty who are five or ten years ahead of you. See where they work now, what their job titles are and how they progressed. You will find commerce graduates working in marketing, HR, sales, supply chain and customer service, and arts graduates working in content, training and public relations.

From this exploration, pick three jobs that make you curious, and no more at first.

Step three, ask people who work in the field

This is the most powerful step and the most neglected. Find two people in each of the three jobs and send each a short, respectful message asking for ten minutes of their time. You will be surprised how many say yes.

Mr. Ahmed, I studied commerce and I am interested in working in HR. Could I have ten minutes to ask you what your working day looks like?

Ask about their actual day, what wears them out most at work, and the skills someone starting today needs. A job looks very different from the outside than from the inside, and this conversation saves you months of guessing.

Step four, try before you commit

Do not decide from behind a screen. Find a small experience in each of the three fields. A summer internship, volunteering with a community organization, a small freelance project, or helping a shop owner run their Facebook page. A small experience answers the most important question: can I bear this work every day?

I personally owe much of where I am to these small experiences. Years of computer maintenance taught me patience with complex problems, accounting taught me respect for numbers, and administrative work taught me that a system saves time and nerves. When I moved into HR, I found that every earlier experience had given me something others did not have.

Step five, decide for a set period and review

After the experiments, choose one path and commit to it for at least a year, with a review every six months. You are not making a decision for the rest of your life, only for the next stage. That alone removes much of the fear that stops young people from choosing at all.

Do I have to work in my field of study

This is one of the questions I get most after workshops, and the short answer is no, not necessarily.

Your degree opens the first door and shows an employer that you can commit and learn. But after your first two years in the job market, people ask what you are good at and what you have achieved, not which faculty you graduated from. I studied tourism and today I work in business development, HR and marketing, and I know doctors and engineers who became founders, product managers or trainers.

But note one important point. Working outside your field requires you to make up the gap with real skills, professional certificates and practical experience, not with desire alone. If you are already working and thinking of moving to another field, you will find the details in the guide to changing careers without starting from zero.

Common mistakes in choosing a career path

• Choosing a job by salary alone. Salary matters, but a job you hate will drain you, and you will leave it after a year and start again.
• Waiting for the perfect job. The first job is rarely the perfect one, but it gives you experience, contacts and a clearer view of the next step.
• Collecting courses instead of experience. Ten certificates in different fields do not mean you have chosen. They mean you are postponing the choice. I wrote about this trap in the guide to self development in practical steps.
• Listening to every opinion. Ask people who work in the field, not everyone who has an opinion.
• Neglecting soft skills. Whatever path you choose, the way you communicate and handle pressure will decide how fast you progress in it. I explain this in detail in the guide to soft skills.

What happened to Youssef

I come back to Youssef's story because it sums up everything above. After the workshop he followed the steps in order. He found his real skills were in organizing, negotiating and communicating, so he picked three jobs to explore: sales, HR and procurement. He spoke with people working in all three, then volunteered for three months organizing events for a community organization.

A few months later I received a short message from him.

I got hired in procurement at a food company. For the first time, I feel the job is like me.

Youssef did not need an extraordinary passion or a different degree. He only needed an organized way to choose, and the courage to try.

Frequently asked questions about choosing a career path

A final word

Nobody will draw your career path for you, not your family, your university or the friends who went before you. But you are not expected to know everything now. All you have to do is start with a small, measured step, learn from it, then take the next one. That is how I started, from repairing computers in Damanhour, and that is how everyone I know who got somewhere started.

If you have a question about your path that this guide did not answer, send it to me on LinkedIn, and I will try to answer it in the coming articles.

Mahmoud Saied

Business development and HR consultant, and founder of REFORMHRM, the HR division of Reform Group. He writes practical guides for young people and employees on careers, soft skills and handling work pressure.

All articles by the author and LinkedIn