10 Big-Impact Careers

Unless you’re at risk of poverty, in which you’ll understandably take any job, most people want their job to be impactful.
Of course, all ethical work is impactful, from ditch digger on up. But if you’re thinking (ahem) higher, perhaps the 10 big-impact careers I describe in my PsychologyToday.com article today will help.

Better Informational Interviewing

Career seekers are advised to use informational interviews to help pick a career. Alas, they rarely work as well as is touted.

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer an improved approach to learning about a career, including a better approach to informational interviewing. 

An Easier Yet Valid Way to Choose a Career

Choosing a career can be an angst-ridden process. My PsychologyToday.com article attempts to make it easier. HERE is the link.

Fast-Prep Careers

Julie Sloway, who runs The Prime Time Speakers Bureau has a son who is seeking a rewarding career that requires neither a bachelor's degree nor many years of training. Here's what she's come up with. (To learn about the career, click on the link.)

Orthopedic Technician

Nuclear Medicine Technologist

Prospect Researcher

Medical Meeting Planner

Personal Trainer

Orthoptist

Prosthetics Technician

Sign-Language Interpreter

Diagnostic Medical Sonographer

Electro-Neurodiagnostic Technician

Physical Therapy Assistant

Anesthesia Technician

Electronic Technician

Veterinary Technologist

Speech Pathology Assistant

Animator

Accounting Assistant

Health Information Technician

Respiratory Therapist

Diesel Mechanic

Air Traffic controller

Civil Engineering Technician

MRI Technician

Bio-Medical Equipment Technician

Environmental Technologist

And if those aren't enough, here are descriptions of my favorite careers for 2010 and beyond.

The World's Fastest Way to Find a Career?

This has to be the world's fastest way to find a career that matches your abilities.

Here's how it works. At this federally created site, just click on all the skills/abilities you'd like to use in your next career, click "Go" and up pops a list of best-fitting careers.

Scan all the careers on the the list and use your intuition to pick one or more that's worthy of investigation. Just click on that career and you'll get useful info on it.

Still interested, Google the name of the career and the word "career." (For example: "Accountant career"). Want still more, read a book(s) on the career. You can find on-target ones by searching amazon.com--Again, search on the name of the career and the word "career."

Finally, speak with or, better, visit one or more people on-site in that career. If it still feels right, you probably have found a well-suited career.

Career Lessons from Today's Clients

What would you tell this client to do? (I've changed a few details to protect her anonymity.)

She is a 50-year-old artsy yet aggressive person who's been living on the money she got from a lawsuit against the city of Berkeley. After 20 years, she's run out of money and so needs to go back to work.

She hates corporate America and hierarchies in general, and loves leftist causes. She's friendly with a number of hip-hop band members. She likes to be in charge and to manage projects.

Her last job, back in 1988, was a part-time gig managing a small public college's TV station.

She wants me to help her figure out how to get a decent-paying job. Sounds pretty hopeless, no?

I felt that way too, but after some probing, a number of possibly viable options emerged: manager of hip-hop bands, talent scout for hip-hop-music record labels, production manager for a CD manufacturer, fundraiser or project manager for a leftist nonprofit, salesperson for a company making alternative products--for example, medicinal herbs or alternative books, and manager or fundraiser for a small community TV or radio station.

She'll do some research on each of those, and I believe there's a reasonable chance she'll end up making decent money at one of them.

The lesson: career options exist for nearly anyone.

My next client, during her first session, had red hair that looked like the Wicked Witch of the West. When she returned for her second session, she got her hair cut into a beautiful shoulder-length style, colored a tasteful auburn. She was glowing with excitement about it.

I didn't see her for a year, and she came back for a tuneup session today. Her hair was closely cropped and gray, severe. My first thought was that she had developed cancer, had chemotherapy, and so cut her hair short to hide the baldness. But that silent hypothesis was quickly dispelled when she asked, "Do you like my hair? I love it. I feel so much more confident with it and all the women in my office are so much friendlier to me."

Lessons: There's great subjectivity in what's seen as attractive. And a change in appearance can affect one's personality as much or more than therapy can.

So, dear reader, what, if anything, would you like to consider changing about your appearance that might improve your self-confidence?

The Most Authoritative Career Guide--just published

The Occupational Outlook Handbook provides comprehensive profiles of 275 popular careers, including predictions about demand. The new edition has just been published. It's free online or $20 in book form.

Jist, publisher of the book version, just sent me a press release summarizing what's new in this year's Occupational Outlook Handbook:

"Some occupations are now expected to grow considerably faster than was previously expected, notably those in the Finance and Insurance and Human Service clusters. Overall, however, projections for job growth now are a little less optimistic than two years ago, especially in the Manufacturing and Retail and Wholesale Sales and Service clusters. Job-growth forecasts also have been cut back, though to a lesser extent, for the high-flying Health Science and Education and Training clusters...The U.S. economy has shifted toward service industries such as health care and hospitality. As a result, more and more opportunities will be found in jobs that involve a lot of interpersonal contact, and chances to work alone will become more scarce."

Is Career Counseling a Waste?

It's odd for me to be raising that question in that I'm a career counselor. Yet stories like this one a client told me just an hour ago (I'll change a few irrelevant details to protect his anonymity,) does give me pause:

After four years studying at Harvard, he came to believe money was a shackle and the root of much evil. So he went to his CitiBank and withdrew all his money, in $100 bills. He then stood at the main entrance to the Harvard campus (the gateway to one of America's hub of liberal thought) and gave away all the $100 bills at random.

He was shocked that well-heeled Harvard students who had been filled with "redistributive justice" rhetoric and indeed probably espoused it in class discussions and term papers, pushed homeless people away to attempt to get a second $100. Distraught as perhaps only Hamlet has been, he fled to his Harvard advisor's office and screamed at the meaningless of it all. What did his advisor do? Called the police and had him involuntarily committed to the local mental hospital.

After my client was released, he took a job--at a bank, the icon representing everything he had reviled. The punch line: He liked his job and succeeded there, eventually earning a six-figure salary.

This is the most extreme such story I've heard, but I've known many people who ended up happy in careers that no career counselor could have predicted to be well-suited.

Although I am a career counselor/coach, my best advice to those seeking aid in choosing a career: Forgo seeing a career advisor. Instead, for a week or two, keep musing about career and write any clues in a memo pad, which you keep with you at all times. After that, look at my Best Careers, 2008 and my book, Cool Careers for Dummies, to trigger additional ideas.