Choosing The Right Career: A Guide
One of the most common questions we get from our clients is “How do I know what’s the right career for me?”. It’s a question a lot of people struggle to answer. Partly because we haven’t been taught how to approach career choices and partly because there is so much outdated advice out there on how to pick the right career. Most career advice we come across doesn’t help people understand what is right for them and tends to address short-term challenges, like how to find a new job.
The most common mistake people make here is choosing jobs as a reaction to something that makes them unhappy in their current workplace. It may be about a boss they don’t get along with, mind-numbingly boring tasks, toxic company culture, or being overlooked for a promotion.
All these things might be good reasons to start looking for a new job. But focusing on the thing you’re leaving behind instead of where you are going isn’t always a recipe for success. Sure, some people have taken this approach and still managed to find the right career eventually. But for plenty of people, this approach has just led to a series of “out of the frying pan, into the fire” experiences. They leave their old job only to find themselves in a new job that comes with its own set of problems, which they failed to foresee because they were thinking about the problems they were leaving behind.
Here’s the good news - figuring out the right career for you doesn’t have to be difficult. There is a way to transform your career path from a game of chance to a game of skill. All it takes is a mindset shift.
Your Job Has A Job
Yes, you read that right. The key to finding the right career is to recognize that your job has a job to do, for you.
Think about any job description or ad you’ve ever seen. It had a list of bullets describing a variety of tasks you’d be expected to do, right? Looking at it differently, these tasks represent the value you would be expected to create for the company to receive your paycheck.
To understand what’s the right career for you, you should approach your jobs in the same way a company approaches job candidates. Instead of thinking of it in terms of “I’m getting a job”, you should think of it as “I’m hiring a job”. And when you’re hiring someone, you need to be clear about what job they are supposed to do for you. The way we look at it, there are 5 things a career and a specific job should do for you:
Move you closer to your vision
Enable you to act in line with your values and mission
Help you develop your skills
Have a social cost that you’re willing and able to pay
Compensate you at a level you’re happy with
Most people haven’t thought about all of these things. So you should always start the process of figuring out the right career by making sure you know what they mean for you.
Being a visionary
Even if you have never articulated your vision before, on some level you probably know what it is. It’s about the things that bring us happiness. There is no right or wrong here. And no type of vision is inherently better than another. It only needs to make sense to you. Having worked on these things with hundreds of people, we’ve seen many different visions. But in most cases, they fall into one of three categories.
The first one is Achievement Visions. Commonly, people who give high priority to their careers have visions that strive for specific career outcomes. One example of an Achievement Vision would be “to become a Fortune 500 CEO”.
The second one is Lifestyle Visions. Some common versions are centered around being able to spend a lot of time with one’s family, being able to prioritize one’s health, or having a job that provides a lot of opportunities to learn interesting new things.
The third category is Materialistic Visions. And no, that doesn’t have to mean “getting Gordon Gekko rich”. We’re talking about things like achieving financial freedom, living a debt-free life, or moving to a beach house. Or, for that matter, getting Gordon Gekko rich. If that’s your thing, go for it! Just please, stay away from our pension savings.
These are just some examples. Your vision might be some combination of these three categories, or something entirely different. Remember, there’s no right or wrong here. The important thing is that you know what it is so that you can evaluate which career will move you towards it.
Understanding your values and mission
Whether we know what our core values are or not, we all have them. Our values are behind a lot of our decision making. They also function as a feedback mechanism. Acting in line with our values will make us feel good and give us a sense that we’re doing the right thing. On the other hand, when our actions are in conflict with our values, we might experience a range of negative emotions. This happens even when those actions lead to success, in the traditional sense. Meaning, you can become the employee of the month, get a promotion, earn a lot of money and STILL feel bad.
One example of such actions could be having to lay people off. Some people might not consider this to be such a big deal. They may think to themselves “Sure, it’s unpleasant. But I have a management position and it comes with the territory. So I’ll just buckle up and get it done.”.
However, this can be an excruciating situation for another person whose core values are compassion or community. Even if they know that firing this employee is the right thing to do, they’ll feel bad because it goes against their values to subject another person to such an upsetting experience. So when it comes to picking the right career, they should probably try to avoid career paths where firing people is a frequent task. They also might want to avoid workplaces where this is an ingrained part of the culture or companies that, due to economic difficulties, do frequent rounds of downsizing.
Our mission is what some people call “our WHY”. It gives us a sense of purpose that goes beyond ourselves. You can find mission-driven individuals in all kinds of careers. Whether they are healthcare workers, green technology entrepreneurs, politicians, social justice activists, police officers, or military personnel - many people choose their careers because they believe that their efforts will contribute to the greater good. Their mission gives them great satisfaction when they succeed because they are contributing to a cause. And it can be an amazing source of resilience when things are tough.
Developing skills
Skills development is important for several reasons. The obvious one is that our career success depends on the skills we have. We live in a society where the pace of technological development is increasing. Consequently, we’re required to specialize and constantly develop new skills. But there is also a more intrinsic reason - being good at something can be a rewarding experience in itself. Mastering something can do wonders for our confidence, motivation and personal pride.
You should have a clear idea of which skills you want to develop! These can be skills you already have, that you want to take to the next level. They can also be skills you don’t currently have but dream about developing. Bottom line - as long as you have a job, you’ll develop skills. Spending 40+ hours a week on anything will do that. So you might as well develop the ones that are important to you.
Paying the social cost
Every job and career comes with a cost. Traditionally, this is framed as the challenge of achieving a work-life balance. We don’t like that framing for several reasons. But that’s a topic for a different post. For now, we’d like to introduce the notion of social cost.
The social cost can be having less time for your family, friends or personal interests. But it can be other things too. Some jobs can be inherently more stressful than others, irrespective of the number of work hours. Some may require you to spend a lot of time on corporate politics. Some will include frequent traveling. Some jobs aren’t a perfect fit with your personality and you may need to act in ways that bring you discomfort.
Careers, like everything else in life, come with tradeoffs. And you should know what social cost you’re willing and able to pay at any given point in time. For most people, that cost will be different at different stages of their lives and careers. But it could also vary depending on what you’re getting out of the experience. Maybe you’d be willing to sacrifice some of your free time for a couple of years if it meant that you could develop a critical skill at a company where you can learn from the best? Or tolerate more corporate politics to the right brand name on your resume?
The right compensation
Both US and international studies consistently show that a majority of employees are not satisfied with their compensation. But most people we work with have trouble expressing how much they want to make or believe they should make. And while there definitely are people out there who are under-compensated, a lot of time we create stress for ourselves because of FOMO. Maybe we’ve heard about a person in a similar job who’s making 20% more. Or someone else got a big bonus. So we don’t want to “fall behind”.
People have different financial needs and wants, and that’s completely normal. However, we should all make the effort to get clear on what ours are. Having real financial goals means that we can manage our careers accordingly whereas chasing after more money because of others will always be a moving target.
Once you set tangible financial goals, you could end up with the conclusion that you, in fact, do need more money. Maybe you’re trying to buy a house and need money for the down payment. Or you’d like to send your kids to a good private school. Or just take that trip around the world you’ve always dreamt of.
But you might also realize that you’re making enough. And when you have enough money, you have more freedom to prioritize some of the other things we discussed in this post, such as realizing your vision or developing your skills.
Taking action
The most important thing about this approach to choosing the right career is to personalize it to your situation. Just because we discussed 5 jobs that your job should do for you, it doesn’t mean that each is worth 20%. Some people are so mission-driven that they can forgo everything else and still be happy as long as their job lets them live their mission. Others might not be mission-driven at all but have a vision that will require more money to realize.
If you can figure out which of these jobs are important to you, you’ll be able to evaluate careers better and understand which jobs fit your preferences. So go ahead, give your job a job!
Tiles Collab is a career development community. We help high performers identify the right career paths, create career plans and achieve their goals by focusing on strategies and tactics that work in real life. Visit our homepage for more information about our approach and services.