Tough Problems: Choosing a Career

Today's PsychologyToday.com article is is the second in the Tough Problems series. In each, I present two composite questions faced by my clients and my response to each. This one addresses two people's problem in choosing a career. 

11 Big-Money, Big-Status Careers

Most people believe it’s shallow to choose a career based mainly on money and status, but being human, they often succumb, forgoing careers that would be more contributory and pleasurable.

So in recognition of that common human craving, my PsychologyToday.com article today offers some careers offering big money and status.

Big 5 Careers Options for people who score high or low on the Big Five personality traits.

Typically, careers are recommended based on skills, aptitudes and interests, for example, as in the Holland RIASEC Codes: hands-on, investigative, artistic, social, entrepreneurial, and office-detail. 
Less often are careers matched to today’s popular Big 5 personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability.

Of course, with thousands of careers and variants thereof, I can only scratch the surface in a PsychologyToday.com article. I’ve picked careers that capitalize on each personality style (low as well as high) and that Psychology Today readers might enjoy and do well at. For each category, I offer merely one or occasionally two or three careers that may be particularly worth your attention.

Choosing a Career: An unconventional approach

Most people end up in their career sub-optimally:

• They fall into their careers by chance.
• They pick from a few common choices: doctor lawyer, teacher, electrician, psychologist, etc.
• With a career advisor, human, video, computer, or text, they inventory, abilities, skills, interests (if they have them, passions), and values.

The latter approach would seem optimal but it’s not:

• It too often yields unrealistic goals—For example, the person dreams of making a solid living as an environmentalist, performer, sports executive, or visual artist. Unless you’re brilliant, talented, connected, or dogged, ideally all the above, they'll why the words “starving” and “artist” so often adjoin.
• Most careers don’t require a narrowly constrained set of attributes. For example, there are introverted and extroverted psychotherapists, brilliant and merely workmanlike ones, sciencey and feeling-oriented ones.
• There are tens of thousands of careers, most that have many variants. Even with a computer to screen careers, you’ll be (not very validly) matched to a few from just a few hundred. Much better fits could remain buried.

A better way?
In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer an approach that would seem to balance ease with accuracy.

14 Careers for Consider and 5 That Are Overrated

It is standard and probably correct that there are no best careers, only careers that are well-suited to a particular person.

But sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good and it helps for a job-seeker to see a curated list.
My PsychologyToday.com article today describes 14 careers, selected from the 340 I profile in my new book, Careers for Dummies, score high on characteristics sought by an educated readership. After describing the 14, I describe five careers I believe are overrated.

20 Questions: Help in choosing your career

As my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer the 20 questions I’ve asked my clients that have been most helpful in unearthing a wise choice of career.

The Case for a Career as a Songwriter

As a thought experiment, I decided to try to make a case for pursuing one of the careers least likely to generate even a survival living: songwriter. I post that as my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Nine Professions' Downsides: Physician, clinical psychologist, manager, lawyer, teacher, social worker, accountant, career counselor, librarian

Most reviews of careers have a positive bias. That's largely because most of the reviewers are in those careers. Those unhappy with it have left before being asked to describe it in an interview.  Also, cognitive dissonance causes a positive bias: People have devoted years to the career, so it's hard to acknowledge that it has been a poor investment of time and money.

To provide a bit of counterbalance, in my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer downsides of nine popular careers.

An Analytical Approach to Choosing Your Career

In yesterday's PsychologyToday.com article, I outlined a holistic approach to choosing a career. In today's, I offer a more analytic approach.

What Careers Match Your Core Skill

In a previous PsychologyToday.com article, I reviewed the hundreds of skills listed in Gallup’s Strengths Finder, Eureka’s Microskills, the Knowdell Motivated Skills Card Sort, Elevations, and Skills Profiler, and then adapted or wrote 26 skills that I believe are most likely to help people find and succeed in white-collar or professional employment.

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, for each of those skills, I list one or more careers that require that skill and is liked by many people. For each career, I include a link to a site with information on it.

This article may be of use to you even if you’re staying put in your current career or job. Scan the list of skills to find one or more that you’re good at and would enjoy using more in your job. Might there be ways to tweak what you do so you spend more time using your favorite skills?

Diary of a Job Seeker

A caller to my radio show yesterday called for help: He has a degree from Berkeley and the best job he’s been able to get is pizza deliverer.

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I create a fictitious diary that embeds some career lessons. HERE is the link. 

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.

Are You Overlooking a Key to Your Career Contentment?

My PsychologyToday.com article today: Are You Overlooking a Key to Your Career Contentment?

In it, I offer 11 such keys.

Days of Our Work Lives: An unvarnished look at work today: Part II: Susan's Saga. Episode 2: Career Counseling

Days of Our Work Lives

Part II: Susan's Saga 

 

EPISODE 2 Career Counseling

In the previous episode, Susan started to contemplate life without David--including the fear she'd end up a bag lady. She decided to look into finding a career counselor. 

First, Susan called a career coach she ended up calling The Moneygrubber: He'd only sell a $4,900 bronze package, $6,900 silver package, or $9,900 gold package. Susan thought, "Way too much. Besides, anyone who makes you commit that much money up-front probably is afraid that after a session or two, you'll quit."

Susan called the next counselor, "The Tester:" That counselor would devote three sessions to an alphabet soup of career assessments: DISC, SII, and MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.) One of the few specifics Susan still remembered from her college courses was her psychology professor saying, "Those career 'tests,' especially the Myers-Briggs, aren't much more valid than a horoscope."

Susan called the third counselor "The Listener:"  "Uh huh," "Tell me more." "I hear you saying" (then parrots back.") Susan thought, "She'll never teach me anything. She's like those consultants who steal your watch to tell you what time it is."

Susan decided to do at least one session with the fourth coach, Michelle, whom she called The Practical Dreamer. Susan liked that Michelle said, "I keep my head in the clouds, feet on the ground," whatever that means.  Susan also liked that Michelle would, a week before the first session, email Susan a probing new-client questionnaire to complete at home. That would serve as the springboard for the session. That way, Susan wouldn't have to pay the counselor for all that questioning-and-answering. Plus, Susan would have the time to reflect on the questions rather than having to come up with a great answer on the fly.

In fact, Susan felt she got more from answering the questionnaire than from the session. Susan's questionnaire answers made clear that her career non-negotiables were: a creative component and working in an organization rather than solo so she'd have lots of people contact and a support infrastructure. Her best abilities were staying calm, leading kids, and a refined aesthetic. Her core value was education. Susan wondered whether all those stood out simply because her most recent activity was directing Rent at the middle school.

Susan also worried, "Isn't all that too vague?" Michelle responded, "Getting more specific would be false precision. You could be satisfied in many fields and settings. For example, you never would think of being in soybean processing but if a nice person offered you a good job helping him to set up his soybean processing facility, I'd bet you'd give it a try and could enjoy it. Right?" Susan agreed. 

At the end of the session, Michelle gave Susan a homework assignment that, while just common sense, felt right: "Explore new vistas, maybe volunteer. Put yourself in places you might learn more about yourself, be exposed to new career ideas and to people who could give you a good job lead." 

Susan left after that two-hour session feeling she had gotten her $350 worth but decided not to make another appointment. She'd simply follow Michelle's advice to explore. 

The next episode is posted HERE.

How I Help My Clients Choose a Career

My contribution today to AOL summarizes how I help my clients choose a career. My goal for the article was to enable you to be your own career counselor.

A Simpler Way to Choose a Career

This is the first of a series of five posts, each of which distills one of the presentations I made at the Commonwealth Club this month.

Many people struggle too hard to pick their career. They spend years of angst waiting on the sidelines for the magically perfect career to descend like manna from heaven.

Here's a more likely path to career contentment:

• Pick what feels best, even if doesn't yield ecstasy. Passion usually comes after you've done the items below.
• Get good training. (Tip: Getting mentored and trained on the job is underrated and more often possible than you may think.)
• Do a thorough job search so you get multiple job offers and thus can choose the best one.
• Tweak the job description to match your strengths.

Do just those things and you'll likely be more satisfied with your career than are most people.

That said, here are a few careers that many people find rewarding and which promise a decent job market for the foreseeable future:

Optometrist: high earnings, good status, high success rate with patients, regular hours. Training: four years post-bachelors or a seven-year BS/OD program.

Terrorism prevention: biochemical, cyber, conventional. Yes, opportunities are best for PhD-level scientists but social science analysts are needed with expertise in Middle Eastern and home-grown terrorism.

Immigration.  Odds are that President Obama will get reelected, and he has promised to make amnesty/comprehensive immigration reform top-priority. Thousands of government workers will be needed to process citizenship applications, teach courses to prepare immigrants for the citizenship exam, etc.

Accountant. Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, and President Obama's promise (threat?) to increase IRS funding suggest a robust market for accountants, especially auditors. Perhaps even more plentiful will be jobs for health care accountants. ObamaCare has been called a full-employment act for accountants.

All things Muslim. We hear a lot about the U.S.'s  burgeoning Latino population but close behind are Muslims:  from conversion, immigration, and a high birth rate. As all ethnic and religious groups, Muslims have preferred services and products. For example, Muslim women will not disrobe before a male health care provider, so there's a great need for Arabic-and Farsi-speaking female health care providers. An under-the-radar product example: Muslims are fond of goat meat and their religion requires animals to be slaughtered using a special method. So Halal goat farming may be a viable U.S career.

Simple, cloneable self-employment:  Look at successful retailers of a simple product: shoeshine stand, flower cart, gourmet food truck, etc.. Incorporate their best features into your version of that business. When your first store is running well, clone it. That approach is a more likely path to self-employment success than to follow the MBA principles of: choosing a field with high barrier to entry, innovate, and go national fast. My motto: Don't innovate; replicate.

Or here are a few of my favorite low-cost self-employment service businesses: help people create their match.com profiles and photos. College financial aid counseling. Convert cluttered basements and attics into clean, shelf-rich spaces. 

A word about following your passion. Most people's passions fall into just a few categories: the environment, entertainment, fashion, nonprofit work, and creative work. Supply-demand means that it will be tough to make a living in those fields unless you're very talented, well-connected, and/or lucky, ideally all three. You're more likely to make decent money and be treated well in a less crowded field. I'm a big fan of doing what you love...as a hobby.

Hot Careers and Overhyped Careers

In preparation for my radio show tomorrow, I've written an article, "Hot Careers and Overhyped Careers." HERE is the link.

As usual, comments are welcome.

How to Choose a Career

It's probably not your fault if you still don't know what you want to be when you grow up. Reasonably, you assumed school would help you figure it out.

Alas, instructors live in an ivory tower, so most are ill-suited to helping you find a career. And even most students who go to their school's career center leave still unsure what they want to do.

This is a better approach:

Step 1. Scan annotated lists of careers in such guides as the online Occupational Outlook Handbook, or my book, Cool Careers for Dummies.

For even more under-the-radar but currently in-demand careers, go to indeed.com and search on a work-related skill that you'd like to use in your work, for example, writing, analyzing, organizing, selling, or programming. Pick out the one, two, or three careers you find most intriguing.

Step 2. Google the name of that career and the word "careers," for example, "geologist careers." or "writing careers." Read a few articles that seem on-point.

Step 3. For any career that still seems interesting, search Amazon for a book on that career. In the best such books, each chapter is a different person's report on what it's like in that career.

Step 4. For any career that's still of interest, job shadow at least three (one or two might give unrepresentative perspectives) people in the field. Find them in the Yellow Pages, on the website of the profession's professional association, for example, The American Optometric Association (www.aoa.org), your alumni association, or simply ask your in-person or LinkedIn and Facebook networks for referrals.

While you're job shadowing, ask questions such as, "What's your typical day like?" "What ends up being most important for success in this career?" "Why might someone leave this career?" and "What's the best way to get training so you're excellent in this career?"

Step 5. If a career still sounds good, choose it, even if you're not sure. Otherwise, you may be waiting for Godot. Career contentment usually only comes after you've entered it and, like a great-looking suit, tailored and accessorized to fit you.

For example, career coaching fit me only moderately but I now love it, in large measure because I adapted it to fit me: I made nonnegotiable that I'd work from home and that I'd be a more active participant in sessions than the typical counselor who mainly just listens. I also stayed committed to getting better and better rather than giving up after a couple of years of mediocre performance.

A Contrarian Approach to Choosing a Career

Most people choose a career based on their previous experiences and successes. But I'm wondering if a case can't be made for choosing a career that is completely different from what the person has done in the done in the past.

If someone has been painfully shy all her life and avoided people both in career and personally, mightn't it be exciting, motivating, for her to choose a career that put her in front of people--for example, a salesperson or even a performer?

If someone has spent his life decrying capitalism, might he--if he allowed himself to admit it to himself--be intrigued by the notion of working for a Fortune-500 corporation?

If someone has been a science-centered person, mightn't she enjoy applying her mind to something artistic--for example, creating breakthrough, stunning store displays?

Most of us are attracted by doing something new and/or by exploring a yet unexpressed part of who we are. So I'm wondering if people wouldn't be more motivated to make the significant effort to prepare for a career and then land a job in it if their goal was something other than to build on their experiences and already expressed strengths.

What do you think?

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.