1. Winston County Technical Center
Bethany Flanagan, School Counselor

2. Decision Making and Opportunity costs
How do you make decisions?
Influences on Decisions
Attitude
Emotions
Values and Ethics
Family
Peers
Media
Society and Culture
Economic Factors
The longer a decision will affect your life, the more time you need to think about it.

3. The Decision-Making Process
Define your needs and wants.
Analyze your resources.
Identify your choices.
Gather information.
Evaluate your choices.
Make a decision.
Plan how to reach your goal.
Following this process will help you gather and organize the information you need to make an important decision, such as a career choice.

4. Using the Decision-Making Process to Choose a Career
Step 1: Define Your Needs and Wants
The path to a career starts with thinking about your goals, hopes, and dreams, as well as thinking about the lifestyle you want.
Step 2: Analyze Your Personal Resources
Your personal resources include your values, interests, aptitudes, abilities, talents, personality traits, and learning styles.
Being aware of who you are and what you have to offer will help you make good career choices.
Step 3: Identify Your Career Choices
Select several possible careers and match them to your personal needs and resources.
Keep your mind open to life’s changes and possibilities.

5. Using the Decision-Making Process to Choose a Career
Step 4: Research Your Career Choices
After you identify possible careers, you will want to learn more about them before making a choice.
Step 5: Evaluate Your Career Choices
Look at each career option and think about whether it matches your personal needs and resources.
Step 6 and 7: Make Your Decision and Plan How to Reach Your Goal
You may discover at some point that your career goal is unrealistic or undesirable.
You can then repeat the decision-making process to arrive at a new goal.

6. Making decisions in the workplace
Effective Decision Making
You make hundreds of decisions everyday.
In the world of work, you will want to make the best decisions possible and significant long- term decisions.
The Decision-Making Process
Decision making is following a logical series of steps to identify and evaluate possibilities and arrive at a workable choice. (Listed on slide 3)
Smart decision makers use criteria.
Criteria are standards of judgment for comparing and evaluating choices.
Criteria that is important:
Product quality
Customer satisfaction
Safety
Efficiency
Economic factors

7. Evaluate your choices Consequence
Every decision you make will have a consequence, which is an effect or outcome.
Evaluating alternatives usually means understanding and predicting possible consequences.
What are the risks and rewards involved in this decision?
How does this decision directly affect me?
How will I be judged?
What effect will this decision have on my team or department?
What effect will this decision have on my company?

8. Make a decision on how to reach your goal
Once you have made a decision, you can put your decision into action.
Prioritize the tasks to be done.
To prioritize means to order things from first to last or from most important to least important.