Finding the Right Career?

A brief article titled "Finding the Right Career" in Investors Business Daily captured my attention.

Test Drive Other Options

Thomas Maple is a college counselor who made the interesting comment, "A career decision-making process should involve many hours of exploration over the course of weeks and months." Agreed. In Hired! I discuss the danger of a career approach exactly opposite to this advice: thinking of oneself only as your most recent job title. As I talk with people engaged in job search and reemployment, I continually emphasize my common theme that everyone is an owner of skills and knowledge, and not just a job title. All of us can identify job and career paths that intrigue us. To actually carry out this exploration Maple offers three imminently practical paths:

1. Talk with people already in that potential job area and get real information from people with "boots on the ground."
2. Shadow or apprentice yourself to people already in that job area so you can actually experience what the job is like.
3. Volunteer, especially in pursuing nonprofit organizations, so you can be meaningfully involved in contributing in that job area as you learn about it.

Get a Second, or Third, Opinion

Another comment that impressed me was that all of us have blind spots and we can always benefit from an outside perspective from family, friends or colleagues. Maria Moats found herself confronted very early in her career with a dilemma when her father became ill. "Family has to come first," she said, and she had to decide between continuing her work in Dallas, or quitting to move to her family in El Paso. Or so she thought. When she shared her decision to quit with her partner, his unemotional and detached perspective uncovered a third option: Moats could transfer to the company's El Paso office. As she summarized this she said that an inexperienced worker, "My perspective was limited. I was not thinking about my value to the firm."

It's Your Life - Not Your Parents' or Your Uncle's

Maples makes the terse observation that "A desire to please other people with one's career choice is one of the chief causes of career dissatisfaction." I have a family story that matches this very closely. A relative started his career in engineering but after a couple of years in the engineering world his brain was about to explode. He was pretty miserable. He had not chosen engineering as much as it had been chosen for him. He did his best to conform but the dissonance was just too much. He then applied to and was accepted to law school. He has been in law practice for almost 4 decades now and still loves it. But he still wishes he had been more introspective before spending all that money on his engineering degree.

So be focused, be cautious, and be flexible. Good advice.