Do you know where your career is going?

Do you know where your career is going? As staying with the same company for life becomes rarer, more and more people aren't sure. If you're one of them, then maybe it's time to take time out, sit back, and have a think.

It's all too common to find that you've got into your job through a series of coincidences, each one taking you a little further away from where you were aiming to go when you started. There is simply a huge gap between the jobs that people get and the jobs they wanted. No-one aspires to work at a paper company, but someone's got to do it. Once you've been there a few years, you suddenly realise that your only options are to either move sideways into a similar job somewhere else, or move upwards in the hierarchy and become a manager.

So what do you do. The answer is to finally answer to yourself that most elusive of questions: what do you want to be doing five years from now? Ten? Twenty? If the answer isn't "what I'm doing now" or "I want to be a high-level manager", then what you need is drastic action.

What you might not realise, though, is that forging out a career path isn't as difficult as you might think. If you can free yourself from the day-to-day struggle to survive by living below your means for a year or so and accumulating some savings, you suddenly have some time to get where you want to be in the job market. Whatever your ambition is, the chances are that there's an entry-level job going somewhere, or a community of enthusiastic amateurs.

If it's really what you've wanted to do all your life, then it should be as simple as getting started and getting noticed. And if it doesn't work out, then you've always got the other job to fall back on. Whether you succeed or fail, it's always better to try, and it's not as hard to do as you think. Take the plunge.