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Identifying your interest-aptitude-personality are most important factors in considering career choices. These three aspects require critical evaluation as one remains in a career for more than 30 years of ones life.

Just because we are interested in something does not mean that we will automatically be good at it. We get interested in certain careers as we get to hear some positive and glamorous phrases like - highly demanding career, smart career to get in, people get lot of power to exert, can earn lot of money, it's world class company etc. It is a known fact that we are most likely to excel at what we like to do provided we have the aptitude and personality for that thing. Thus, one needs to seriously think of things one have done in the past where one succeeded. It could be anything, such as:

• Written a story and it got published
• Influenced a friend to finish the projects on time.
• Designed a computer program.

Think of a certain activity which will help you focus on your interests. Take enough information from the people in the field; visit the work setting if possible or simply read more information. Know your true interest.

Aptitude is nothing but the potential you are born with which in turn help you to learn any task easily and quickly. Think of anything that you do better than average. For example: solving physics problem, making poster, remembering minute details etc.

Besides learning the task involved in our dream career, we need to know our personality as it encompasses the behaviors that make each one of us unique and differentiates us from others. If our choice of career matches with our behavior, then we become unique in our performance, which in turns helps us to reach our maximum growth. Personality traits are nothing but your patterns of behavior, temperament and emotion. Here is a problem; one can really have a list more than 50 traits which would help us to do well in our careers. The simple way to solve this problem is writing down your top 10 traits on a paper and matching them to the career you wish to take on. If you need help, ask three people that you know and trust what they perceive to be your best characteristics. This will help you get clarity on what uniqueness you have in your personality.

Remember career decision making is a continuous process and whenever you get stuck revisit the process.

Some facts about the IAP

Researchers believe that interest is mostly floating in nature. Aptitude remain constant after age of 14 and one can still enhance certain skill to compensate the area you are moderate in. For example: if you are not good in numerical aptitude, then through practice and adapting techniques from your profession, you can perform satisfactorily. But still you should avoid such careers for which you do not have an aptitude as you have to repeatedly learn these skills to be successful in the career. Personality can be modified, for example, if you are an introvert you can still put the skill to reach moderately extrovert personality.