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Becoming A Master Student, Concise, Tenth Edition
Dave Ellis
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| | Career Planning | | | | | | | |
A satisfying and lucrative career is often the goal of education. It pays to clearly define both your career goal and your strategy for reaching it. Then you can plan your education effectively.
Career planning is an adventure that involves exploration. There are dozens of effective paths to
planning your career. The Career Planning Supplement to Becoming a Master Student offers many suggestions on this subject and guides you to even more.
You can begin your career planning adventure now by remembering five basic ideas.
1. You already know a lot about your career plan.
When people learn study skills and life skills, they usually start with finding out things they don’t know. That means discovering new strategies for taking notes, reading, writing, managing time, and other subjects covered in Becoming a Master Student. Career planning is different. You can begin by realizing how much you know right now. You’ve already made many decisions about your career. This is true for young people who say, "I don’t have any idea what I want to be when I grow up." It’s also true for midlife career changers.
Take the student who can’t decide if he wants to be a cost accountant or a tax accountant and then jumps to the conclusion that he is totally lost when it comes to career planning. It’s the same with the student who doesn’t know if he wants to be a veterinary assistant or a nurse.
These people forget that they already know a lot about their career choices. The person who couldn’t decide between veterinary assistance and nursing already ruled out becoming a lawyer, computer programmer, or teacher. He just didn’t know yet whether he had the right bedside manner for horses or for people. The person who was debating tax accounting versus cost accounting
already knew he didn’t want to be a doctor, playwright, or taxicab driver. He did know he liked working with numbers and balancing books.
In each case, these people have already narrowed their list of career choices to a number of jobs in the same field--jobs that draw on the same core skills. In general, they already know what they want to be when they grow up. So do you.
Find a long list of occupations. (One source is The Dictionary of Occupational Titles, a government publication available at many libraries.) Using a stack of 3x5 cards, write down about 100 job titles, one title per card. Sort through the cards and divide them into two piles. Label one pile "Careers I’ve Definitely Ruled Out for Now." Label the other pile "Possibilities I’m Willing to Consider."
It’s common for people to go through a stack of 100 such cards and end up with 95 in the "definitely ruled out" pile and five in the "possibilities" pile. This demonstrates that you already have a career in mind.
2. Career planning is a choice, not a discovery.
Many people approach career planning as if they were panning for gold. They keep sifting through the dirt, clearing the dust, and throwing out rocks. They are hoping to strike it rich and discover the perfect career.
Other people believe they’ll wake up one morning, see the heavens part, and suddenly know what they’re supposed to do. Many of them are still waiting for that magical day to dawn.
We can approach career planning in a different way. It can be the bridge between our dreams and the reality of our future. Instead of seeing a career as something we discover, we can see it as something we choose. We don’t find the right career. We create it.
There’s a big difference between these two approaches. Thinking that there’s only one
"correct" choice for your career can lead to a lot of anxiety. "Did I choose the right one? What if I made a mistake?"
Viewing your career as your creation helps you relax. Instead of anguishing over finding the right career, you stay open to possibilities. You choose one career today, knowing that you can choose again later.
Suppose that you’ve narrowed your list of possible careers to five, and you still can’t
decide. Then just choose one. Any one. Many will have five careers in a lifetime anyway. You may be able to do all your careers, and you can do any one of them first. The important thing is to choose.
One caution is in order. Choosing your career is not something to do in an information vacuum. Rather, choose after you’ve done a lot of research. That includes research into yourself--your skills and interests--and a thorough knowledge of what careers are available.
Career planning materials and counselors can help you on both counts. You can take skills assessments to find out more about what you like doing. You can take career planning courses and read books about careers. You can contact people who are actually doing the job you’re
researching and ask them what it’s like. You can also choose an internship, summer job, or volunteer position in the field that interests you. There’s no end to resources for gathering information about yourself and the job market.
After all the data has been gathered, there’s only one person who can choose your career: you.
This decision does not have to be a weighty one. In fact, it can be like going into your favorite restaurant and choosing from a menu that includes all your favorite dishes. At this point, it’s difficult to make a mistake. Whatever you choose, you can enjoy it.
3. Name names. One key to making your career plan real and to ensuring that you can act on it is naming. Go back over your plan to see that you include specific names whenever they’re called for. For example:
- Name your job. Take the skills you enjoy using and find out which jobs use them. What are those jobs called? List them. Note that the same job may have different names.
- Name your company, agency, or organization. If you want to be self-employed or start your own business, name the product or service you’d sell. Also list some possible names for your business.
- Name your contacts. Take the list you just compiled. What people in these organizations are responsible for hiring? List those people and contact them directly. If you choose self-employment, list the names of possible customers or clients.
- Name your location. Ask yourself if your career choices are consistent with your preferences about where to live and work. For example, someone who wants to make a living as a studio musician might consider living in a large city such as New York or Toronto. This contrasts with the freelance graphic artist who conducts her business mainly by phone, fax, and mail. She may
be able to live anywhere and still pursue her career.
4. Get back to your purpose. When we’re deep into the details of planning, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. Listing skills, researching jobs, writing resumes--all of this is necessary and useful. At the same time, attending to them can obscure
our broadest goals. To get perspective, we can go back to the basics--a life purpose.
Your deepest desire might be to see that hungry children are fed, to make sure that beautiful music keeps getting heard, or to help alcoholics become sober. When such a large purpose is clear, smaller decisions about what to do are often easier.
Career counselor Richard Bolles1 notes that a life purpose makes a career plan simpler and more powerful. It cuts through the stacks of job data and employment figures. Your life purpose is like the guidance system for a rocket. It keeps the plan on target while revealing a path for soaring to the heights.
Want to get to work on creating a life purpose? Check out our lifeline exercise.
5. Change your mind when appropriate. Career planning is not a once-and-for-all proposition. Rather, career plans are made to be changed and refined as you gain new information about yourself and the world. Career planning never ends. If your present career no longer feels right, you can choose again--no matter what stage of life you’re in. The process is the same, whether you’re choosing your first career or your fifth.
"Yes," says the skeptic, "but what if I spend two years going to school and then discover I’m in the wrong field? Think about all the time I’ll waste!"
There are three responses to this. First, you might be killed in an earthquake or struck by lightning in those same two years. But it’s unlikely. It’s also unlikely that you’ll choose a career that’s totally off-base for you as long as you do your homework in career planning. Remember, that you’re working on the difference between your top four or five career
possibilities--not the 95 cards you put in the "definitely not" pile.
Second, there is some risk associated with career planning, just as there’s risk in being alive. Risk cannot be totally avoided. People change. Circumstances change. The idea of facing 30 fourth graders for 205 days each year, which sounded so good 10 years ago, may not be as appealing to you today.
Third, if you are a master student, learning, growing, and benefiting from every experience, there’s no such thing as waste.
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