Next steps

This is an updated chapter from a book I wrote, Choosing Your Career: Proven Strategies for a Satisfying Life. In 2024, I moved the content of that book to this site and made it free.

The 15 contributors I interviewed each have their own beliefs about career happiness, formed from their backgrounds, experiences, personalities, and values. Looking at their advice as a whole, combined with my own thoughts, what can we conclude? Here are 12 themes about actions you can take to help you choose a career path:

1. Complete career assessments or take a class on career decision-making

Many community colleges and government agencies make career assessment available to members of the community. Some examples:

Career Interest Assessment sponsored by Austin Community College

O*NET Interest Profiler sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor

WorkSource sponsored by King County, Washington

Some people do better by completing career assessment with the additional structure of a class.

Here are two highly rated ones:

Career Decisions: From Insight to Impact (Sharon Belden Castonguay via Coursera)

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (Bill Burnett, Dave Evans)

2. Decide if the people in the career field you are considering are people with whom you want to spend a lot of time.

I’ve had clients tell me, “If only I had known what the people in this field were like, I would never have chosen this career.” Different careers attract people with specific interests, values, personalities, and skills. If you like the type of people in a career field, you are more likely to enjoy the career yourself.

Consider joining the professional association for whatever career field interests you. To find it, use your favorite search engine and enter the name of the field and the word “association” or “society” and see what comes up. Then drill down and see if you can find a local chapter.

Professional associations exist to promote career fields and are a terrific source of information. Many professional associations allow non-members to attend a few regular meetings as a guest. Even better, attend a conference and see if the problems and challenges of this field are ones you want to spend your life solving. Don’t put a lot of pressure on yourself to network when you attend meetings or conferences. At this point in the decision-making process, your main task is to act like a cultural anthropologist to see if this is a society you want to join.

3. Do informational interviews to confirm that your online research is accurate.

There is so much information available online now, you can learn a lot about any subject without ever leaving your home. At some point, though, I recommend talking to people who are experienced in the career field you are considering. They can clue you in to trends or insider information that you might have missed.

It has never been easier to find interviewees than it is today. If you find the professional association and/or the conference attendee list for the career field already, that’s a great place to start. You can also ask everyone you know if they know anyone working in the field you are considering. If this doesn’t result in a sufficient number of leads, you can hunt for contacts using LinkedIn, identify faculty members of local colleges and universities who have expertise in specific career areas, look up alumni from your college who are working in the targeted career area, search message boards of online professional forums, and read the business section of newspapers to see who has recently been hired or promoted at organizations of interest.

I recommend sending a letter or e-mail requesting to ask a few questions and make it clear to the prospective interviewee that you are open to communication via telephone or e-mail. This is respectful because it honors the interviewee’s communication preferences. Extraverts will often choose the telephone; introverts will often choose e-mail.

Your letter would look something like this:

Dear [Ms. Smith],

I am a financial manager at [Make Money, Inc.], and I am considering a career change into consumer product marketing. As the first step of a potential transition, I am gathering information that will guide my decision-making process.

I am not seeking a job from you, but I am interested in your opinions about your field and perspective on what skills and experiences I should be acquiring in order to potentially work someday at an organization such as [Cool Co].

I am sure you are very busy, but if we could speak by phone for 10 minutes or communicate via e-mail, I promise not to take advantage of your generosity.

Thank you in advance,

[Your Name]

Remember that you are seeking information so that you can make a decision, not a job. Don’t do a bait-and-switch maneuver where you turn the informational interview into a request for a job. Plan to ask three to six questions at the most, maybe even fewer (a list of suggested Informational Interviewing questions is at the end of this book). Because I don’t recommend asking any one person this many questions, you could ask different questions of different interviewees. Always follow up with a thank-you note afterward.

4. Consider the value of additional training or education.

Before spending a lot of money on additional college degrees, audit a class or take a free class online in the subject you are considering studying. If that goes well, consider doing more. If you like 80% of the classes required for a certificate or a degree in a field you are considering, that’s a good sign. It is almost never the case that you will like 100% of the classes or professors or instructors.

In addition to all the universities and colleges that allow the general public to enroll in a class or two, there are also extension divisions within education whose main mission is to provide educational opportunities for non-traditional learners. Some of the extension programs with the largest class offerings are Arizona State University, Harvard University, the University of California System, The University of Texas at Austin, and University of Washington.

Some other resources to explore are Coursera, EdX, Khan Academy, Udacity, and Udemy. To find more options, Class Central maintains this giant list of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses).

5. “Taste test” whenever possible.

Try to taste test the career you are considering. Most people immediately think this isn’t possible with the career they are considering, but there is usually a way. When I worked at the University of Houston, the most unusual job shadowing match they facilitated was to allow a student considering medical school to watch open heart surgeries at the Texas Medical Center. The student emerged from that afternoon feeling completely inspired and committed to make the grades necessary to be admitted to medical school and become a surgeon. Schools and professional associations are two ways to meet people who can set up job shadowing opportunities.

For many professions and especially in the nonprofit world, you can volunteer as a way to taste test and to gain skills.

6. Take your personality into account when making decisions.

If you have taken a personality test of the Jungian psychology type, and you know your results, you may benefit from these discoveries from Jungian psychology:

People who prefer Extraversion often like to talk through decisions.


People who prefer Introversion often like to reflect internally on decisions, often through journaling.

People who prefer Sensing tend to focus on facts, details, and the present.


People who prefer Intuition tend to focus on possibilities and the future.


People who prefer Thinking are inclined to start with logic.


People who prefer Feeling are inclined to start with values.


People who prefer Judging are happiest when they can make decisions quickly and reach certainty.


People who prefer Perceiving are happiest when they can take their time making decisions and stay flexible.


From observing my clients, I’ve noticed there are two main ways people arrive at good decisions. One seems more heart-centered and one seems more brain-centered, but in reality, you probably need both. To make a heart-centered decision, you first put yourself in a state where you can tune into your inner voice. I’ve noticed that many clients report that they were engaging in the same types of activities when they heard their inner voice speak to them and they just knew that they should pursue a specific career path. These activities include:

• 
Practicing yoga


• Walking / jogging / running

• 
Spending time in nature

• 
Talking with friends or family

• 
Listening to music


• Spending time in water, whether a pool, the ocean, or simply taking a shower

• 
Driving (be careful with this one!)

• Praying
 or meditating (some people use apps like Meditation or Calm)
  


By contrast, a head-centered approach uses facts and data, although when you use the method described below, there is certainly room to factor heart-centered values into the decision-making process. Many of my clients have told me their career choice decision was made easier by using a Decision-Making Matrix.

7. Accept that achievement and change are usually incremental.

After you are clear about what you want, you might feel overwhelmed about the distance between where you currently are and where you want to be. You might also feel impatient because now that you know what you want, you want your situation to be perfect right now. Unfortunately, that’s not the way career development works. Change and mastery are incremental and take months if not years to achieve. Successful people will confirm that there is no such thing as overnight success, only accomplishments building on accomplishments that cumulatively add up to great results and career happiness.

The 10,000-Hour Rule was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers. The rule says it takes about 10,000 hours (or about 20 hours per week for 10 years) to achieve mastery in fields ranging from business and the arts to athletics. Gladwell describes the Beatles and Bill Gates as examples of successful people who might have had a baseline of talent, but who also invested a tremendous amount of time honing their skills. Critics of the 10,000-Hour Rule (including psychologist Dr. Anders Ericsson, whose work was the foundation for Gladwell’s conclusions) say that 10,000 is actually a low estimate, and that true mastery depends on both talent and practice of about 25,000 hours.

If you are going to need 10,000 to 25,000 hours of doing something to achieve mastery, wouldn’t your life be nicer if you choose something you enjoy?

8. Your career happiness may come from creating a career that doesn’t yet exist.

Some people will find that no existing job looks appealing because their ideal path requires integrating aspects from different career paths to create something new and unique to their own skills and goals. When this is the case, the career decision-making process still involves research about the self and the needs of the world and finding the best intersection of the two. You just add more creativity to the mix. If you aren’t sure how to create your own career and you feel stuck, start down a career path but stay open to opportunities to build something different from the traditional way.

9. Your best career might involve starting a business.

I believe there are three types of people in the world:

1. People whose primary preference is to be employed with an organization;


2. People whose primary preference is to be entrepreneurial and to start their own organization; and


3. People who can adapt well to either situation, possibly working as an “intrapreneur,” where they run an autonomous department within a larger organization.


The key is to figure out which one you are.

Entrepreneurs face a different set of challenges from people who are trying to pursue a specific career field. But rest assured that whatever questions you have about entrepreneurship, others have grappled with the same questions before you and they have wisdom to share. Don’t try to blaze this path without learning from those who have attained entrepreneurial success or failure and are willing to tell you about it. Purdue Global compiled this excellent list of resources for entrepreneurs.

10. Whatever you do, don’t go it alone.

Coach Beth Barany says that each person needs three things for a “Triangle of Success”:

1. You need people more experienced than you to learn from;

2. 
You need people less experienced than you to teach and thereby reinforce your knowledge; and


3. You need your peers for a shoulder to lean on, laugh and cry with about the shared journey.
 It can take a while to meet a group of mentors, mentees, and peers, but their perspective, advice, and friendship can make the difference between a mediocre or negative career and a rewarding one.

One reason the coaching industry has become so popular is that professional coaches can also serve as sources of supportive challenge to help you keep momentum in defining and attaining each successive goal.

Don’t struggle alone!

11. Never stop learning and changing.

Many of you will be evaluating and re-evaluating your career until the day you die. This state of flux happens for two reasons: (1) You will change; and (2) The world will change. Some of the jobs that exist today will disappear within a decade. Opportunities will exist in five years that no one has even dreamed about today. Sometimes clients feel distressed when I say this because they were hoping to just hunker down and do the same predictable thing every work day for the rest of their lives. I understand this desire, but I can’t think of a single job that I am confident will remain unchanged over time.

Not only is change occurring in the world, but the rate of change is rapidly increasing. Make values-based decisions about the change.

• If you like the change and want to be part of it, pursue training to increase your expertise in it.

• If your values conflict with the technology (such as with AI), consider joining a group of like-minded people so you can strategize together how to stay true to yourselves while earning a living.

• Either way, connect with others. Change is usually easier when you are part of a community rather than when you feel alone.
  

12. Don’t work so hard at decision-making and/or your career that it ruins your life.

Bronnie Ware, author of The Top Five Regrets of the Dying — A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing, found that “working too hard” is one of the top five regrets of people who have only weeks to live. This is a book about career decision-making, and I know how wonderful focus and clarity feel, but I also know from many years of being a counselor that you can ruin your life by becoming so fixated on finding the “right” path that life passes you by in the meantime. Don’t work so hard at the career decision-making process that you neglect your relationships with people you love or let uncertainty cast a perpetual black cloud on your mood.

As much as you can, approach this process with a spirit of lightness and humor. Try things out and chalk up experiences as part of life. All experiences shape who you are, even the disappointing ones. Once you’ve done something, look for the learning in it and don’t spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself. You make the best choices you can, given the amount of information and the circumstances at the time, and when you know more and circumstances change, you make different choices. As Maya Angelou says, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Treat yourself with the same amount of care and compassion that you would treat a cherished friend.