I try to find a career that suits my sim. There are some careers I haven't gotten around to trying yet and when a new sim is born into one of my families I sometimes make their lives suit the particular career I want to try out.
Right now I am very invested in an alien. My scientist sim (my favourite sim ever - I want to find a way to make her immortal bc I love her too much) invented the portal to Sixam in her job, and I didn't know how it worked because I had never used it before. All of a sudden a very cute alien appeared in the room. And I got super invested and decided that she escaped Sixam through that portal she found and wants to learn everything about the sims world, wants to study history and archaeology, learn all about art, sports culture, pop culture,etc. She is the perfect sim to explore many different career tracks in a way that fits the narrative.
Something that I also do is have a sim enter a career path right after high school, then have them have a midlife crisis (i.e. me getting bored of their job), quit, take some time off, maybe go on vacation if they have money to burn, pick up a new (maybe lucrative) hobby, then pick a new career path / open a business.
I like active and semi-active careers. My favourites are scientist, politician/activist and conservationist. Stupidly I've never gotten around to playing the doctor one and I'm trying to decide which of the kids in my families is going to be a doctor. I cannot think of one I don't like, but maybe the one I like the least is the athlete one... I tend to lose interest in a sim that gets into that career path.
My artistic sims, even though it's quite easy to make a living in the sims with art, I have them take a part time job when they are getting started.
