These 3 career paths are yours to choose from!

Your motivation is to bring your personality and leadership qualities into a company. Management tasks, such as leading employees and controlling / monitoring are key aspects of your work. You take great pleasure in working with other people. You want to move up the hierarchy and thereby gain more responsibility and also status / prestige. This should also be clearly reflected in terms of salary.

The management career is widespread and well implemented in companies. Those interested in a management career therefore have a wide choice as far as their future is concerned. Nevertheless, the management career (also called line career or organizational career) is not suitable for every candidate. Management positions are often filled by people who would be better suited to a specialist or project career.

It should also be taken into account that - due to the limited number of management positions - not every candidate will manage a management career up to the top management.

You enjoy complex situations and have a constant urge for variety. For this reason, you enjoy working on projects - ideally with changing locations, together with different people and on different topics. With increasing experience, you have moved up the project hierarchy and your field of activity has changed accordingly. With this advancement you have been given more responsibility and now also manage employees. 

The project career allows you to take on more responsibility and move up the hierarchy without having to give up project-related work. However, a prerequisite for a project career is a work environment that allows project-related work. Without a sufficient number of projects, a project career cannot be implemented in the company. A project career therefore often ends in middle management.

You see yourself as a highly qualified expert in your field and have a keen interest in technically detailed issues. In your expert work, you want to apply the specialist knowledge you have acquired in everyday life, expand it further and maintain the know-how. During your professional career, you have taken on a succession of jobs and positions with ever-increasing specialist responsibility and expertise.

With the specialist career, you can concentrate on your specialist area as an expert / specialist and still gain importance and influence within the company. The specialist career thus creates an alternative to the management career. As with the project career, however, this career path often ends before you reach the upper management level.