A little tool for decision making in job search or life

When I am working with clients who are trying to make a decision about a job offer or between two career paths, I tell them about a little decision making tool I use to help me figure things out.

I call it my Decision Making Pro / Con tool.

Essentially, this is it: You take a sheet of paper and you make a list of all the positive reasons (pros) about your decision and then all the negative reasons (cons) for against the decision. When you are done with your list, you put a value on each item but you think about each item individually and make the value a real number. Ideally, a table structure works best for this so you can see them in parallel.

The above example puts a value on multiple things and it gives you the example of how to weight each item with different values. Every individual will look at the list differently and it really comes down to what is most important to you.

See the same example with different values:

Only you can put the value on what you think is most important. You can tell though from looking at the scores how different people might care about different things.

Decision-making tool

This little decision making tool can be used to make decisions about many more things than job search. You could use it to decide between two houses or whether to stay in your existing home or buy new, or buy a new car, or go back to school, or invest in a new business.

If you are fair in assigning value, listening to your real reasons and not what you think is the right answer, the tool will help you decide or at least have the options in front of you.

What do you think? Could you see value in creating this chart for you?

Julie Walraven can help you achieve results through using a personalized job search and resume writing  strategy to take the mystery out of the process. To find out how, simply click here!

Photo Credit