Charting your way into a career you really want
First of two parts
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If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to find a better job -- or just find a job -- you have lots of company right now.
January is historically a peak hiring month. Many businesses operate on a calendar year budgeting cycle, so now is when they have money to fill long-standing vacancies or expand.
And now could also be the time for you to land your dream job. But first you have to know where to look and exactly what you’re looking for.
Is that too obvious to bother printing? The country’s legions of job-finding experts say it isn’t.
“There’s a huge disconnect in society when it comes to thinking about careers,” says Elliott Brown, founder of Springboard Forward, a Belmont, Calif., nonprofit that provides career planning services to low-income workers.
“Our parents were told that you went to school and then you made a career choice,” he says, and that was it. And in fact, for generations an American could expect to be hired and retired by the same employer.
The economy -- not to mention individuals’ attention spans and expectations -- has changed. Now, someone will go job hunting at least eight times in his life, writes Richard Bolles in his classic career-seekers guide, “What Color Is Your Parachute?”
The disconnect is that many Americans don’t understand that or don’t want to believe it. The truth is that it’s not only a good idea to periodically reassess your skills, interests and goals, but it’s also imperative to stay marketable. You should think of your career-search process as a long-term journey, Brown advises, with sojourns along the way.
Read on for tips on how to discover a passion that pays. And stay tuned: Next Sunday we’ll help you land your next job.
What to do first
There’s little mystery here, experts agree.
All you have to do is be honest with yourself -- about your skills, what you like to do and (perhaps most important) what you don’t like to do.
Susan W. Miller, the founder of California Career Services, likes to ask employed clients a seemingly simple question: When you think to yourself that you’re having a good day at work, what exactly are you doing? She follows up with: Among all the things that you do every day at work, what is it that you do best?
Ponder that a minute, and then take the Triple I test:
* Interview people who know you well. Friends, relatives and colleagues can help you sort out what truly engages you and turns you off. They may have insights about vocations you never imagined, and they could remind you of some important truths about yourself. If you struggle with percentages or the concept of compound interest flummoxes you, a career in high finance is probably not your best bet no matter how deeply passionate you are in making a lot of money.
* Investigate jobs you think would suit you. Don’t imagine that you would enjoy being a paralegal; talk to a paralegal.
* Intern or volunteer to test your conclusions. Internships aren’t only for the young, and if those positions aren’t available companies are sometimes happy to take on unpaid workers for special assignments. Or the paralegal you called might let you shadow her for a day.
This can not only help validate your research but also give you experience and contacts to “pivot into a new occupation,” says Mark Oldman, co-founder of Vault, a business information firm. He recalls a banker who dreamed of a radio career, interned as a disc jockey and loved it so much that she quit banking for a full-time job on the air.
All of that said, perhaps the most important tip of all: Set realistic expectations. Finding the career path that’s right for you could easily take six months.
Books
Bookstores stack shelf after shelf of self-help career-planning volumes, and new ones come out all the time. “What Color Is Your Parachute?,” first published in 1970, remains a bestseller, and author Bolles has spun off a number other titles, including volumes aimed at teens and about-to-be retirees. Other strong sellers include “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Changing Careers,” “The Vault Guide to Schmoozing,” “Why You Can’t Be Anything You Want to Be” and “Passion and Purpose: How to Identify and Leverage the Powerful Patterns that Shape Your Work/Life.”
There are guides for young adults, mid-career workers, women and people with disabilities, for people interested in healthcare, event planning or finance, for fashionistas, bookworms, film buffs or people who care deeply about the environment. There are volumes for English majors, sociology majors, math geeks and on and on.
Should you read all of them? Or any of them?
Don’t feel overwhelmed. The best counsel is to browse and pick and choose. When you’re on the road to self-discovery, detours can be valuable -- and free of charge with a library card.
Most of the books include exercises designed to tease out your strongest interests, like these from “What Color Is Your Parachute?”
* Draw a picture of your ideal life. With colored pencils on a big sheet of white paper, sketch pictures or symbols to depict where you want to live and with whom, what your house or apartment would look like, and so on. “The power of this exercise is sometimes amazing,” Bolles writes, because it forces you to think more creatively.
* Think of everyone you know, have seen on television or have read about, and ask yourself, out of all of them, whose job would you most like to have? You might surprise yourself.
Websites
Speaking of overwhelmed, you don’t have to look hard to find an abundance of help for the career confused on the Web.
Dozens of authors operate companion sites for their books with tests, checklists, diagrams and links to courses and other resources to help you find your path. “I became enormously frustrated that people live paycheck to paycheck with no passion,” says Nicholas Aretakis, who wrote “No More Ramen” and runs nomoreramenonline.com. He calls it “the twentysomething’s real world survival guide.”
Cued to confused young people struggling to “find themselves” as they leave college or their parent’s orbit, the website is sprinkled with anecdotes, “to do” lists and advice including the pros and cons of grad school and how to become a Supreme Court justice.
“If you were a jock in college,” Aretakis says, “you may not make the PGA or the LPGA, but you could market yourself to sports apparel companies.”
Along the same lines, job search sites such as www.monster.com and www.careerbuilder.com offer free assessment tests, in addition to articles on careers, research on the hottest jobs and bits and pieces about job training.
The “My Interest Finder” quiz on the californiacolleges.edu site asks you to rate how much you would enjoy conducting a symphony or performing hospital nursing duties or map the ocean floor. Other such exams aim to assess the values important to you and match them with possible careers.
Different experts have different opinions about the usefulness of these sites and their tests. But if you’re honest with yourself and pay attention, you can learn something from almost any self-examination -- no matter how silly the questions might seem. Consider these examples from the Princeton Review, which asks you to read the phrases and decide which most describes you:
* I would rather be a wildlife expert / I would rather be a public relations expert.
* I would rather be a company controller / I would rather be a TV anchor.
* I would rather be an auditor / I would rather be a musician.
The government is here to help too. Check out the Labor Department’s website (www.dol.gov) and the one for California’s Employment Development Department ( www.edd.ca.gov/edd js.asp#ExploreCareerOptions).
On the latter, Web surfers will find data on labor market trends and answers to questions like:
* What kinds of businesses hire the job that I’m looking for?
* What jobs use the skills I have now?
* Where can I get training to get a better job?
The site poses one other key question: What jobs will be in demand in the future? Knowing that can be a big assist in deciding what you would like to be paid to do for a living. Among the fastest-growing occupations in California right now: network systems analysts, data communications analysts, computer software engineers, medical scientists, physician assistants and food-preparation workers. Pest-control workers also are high on the list.
Counselors
Forget your high school guidance counselor; career advisors have gone upscale.
Private counselors, who work out personalized plans for each seeker, may charge hourly fees of up to $200. Their services can include assessment tests, job market research, resume help and coaching sessions to calm your interview jitters. Among the local nonprofit agencies that charge less than private firms are Jewish Vocational Services, Women at Work and Forty Plus of Southern California.
The career centers at virtually every college and university are gold mines for befuddled students and alumni. At Los Angeles Trade Technical College, you don’t even have to be a student to get face time with counselor Deborah Campbell and her colleagues.
“You have no idea how many lawyers I see walk in my door saying, ‘I’m done,’ ” she says. Ditto for burned-out nurses eager to change course.
Like many counselors, Campbell says she asks the people who come to her some “pretty global” questions. Among her favorites: What do you like to do in your spare time? What was your favorite class in school?
At Springboard Forward, clients attend workshops to help create what Brown calls their career maps. These don’t necessarily include a final destination. But they always have what he calls “the components” -- skills, interests, dreams -- of what he reminds clients is going to be quite a trip.
“I tell people to relax,” Brown says. “It’s going to be a long journey.”
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Coming next week: The nuts and bolts of job hunting.
