What Color Is Your Parachute? Part 19

Traditionally attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882).

Chapter 10.

Five Ways to Change Careers.

The First Way to Change Careers:.

The Internet.

The first idea that occurs to people seeking guidance on how to change careers, these days, is the Internet. Naturally, there is lots of advice there, but more specifically there is O*Net Online, which I mentioned in chapter 2. It is a digital, online treasure house of information, and up-to-date information at that, about careers.

Go to the site (www.onetonline.org/find or www.onetonline.org/search) and you will see. Suggested careers (or occupations) are grouped or cla.s.sified by any or all of the following: by industries in great demand; green economies; largest number of openings antic.i.p.ated; STEM disciplines (that would be Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math); amount of preparation or training required; O*NET-SOC codes; Military Occupation Cla.s.sification (equivalencies); abilities required; occupational knowledge required; interests, skill sets, work values, and work activities required; values you want at work; tasks and duties involved; tools, technology, machines, equipment, and software used; and so on.

Once you find an occupation you want to know more about, they have a specially developed Content Model (www.onetcenter.org/content.html), which can run ten to twelve pages of print-outs for each occupation. Maintained by the U.S. government's Department of Labor, it is very thorough, but at the same time (hate so say it), limited. Chief among its limitations is the fact that while its predecessor, The Dictionary of Occupational t.i.tles, Fourth Edition, covered 12,741 occupations, O*Net covers only 900 or so.1 Their claim is that the D.O.T. (as it's called) was for a manufacturing age, while O*NET is for an information age.

Anyway, this decision to just cover 900 or so, leaves a lot of careers, occupations, and jobs uncovered and unmentioned.2 Still, you may find a lot of very helpful stuff, there. Especially if you're a returning veteran (www.mynextmove.org/vets).

The Second Way to Change Careers:.

Tests.

They're technically not "tests." Their real name is instruments, or a.s.sessments. But we'll use the popular name for them, here.

I'm not sure how well they'll help you choose a new career, but you will find them everywhere: in books, on the Internet, in the offices of guidance counselors, or vocational psychologists, career coaches, etc. And sometimes this turns out to be exactly the kind of guidance, the kind of insight, the kind of direction, that career choosers or changers are looking for.

But why only sometimes? Why doesn't this search for a magic bullet always work? Aha! Good question! Since I've watched these tests literally for decades, I can share with you my: Six Learnings About Testing 1. You are absolutely unique. There is no person in the world like you. It follows from this that no test can measure YOU; it can only describe the family to which you belong.

Tests tend to divide the population into what we might call groups, tribes, or families-made up of all those people who answered the test the same way. After you've taken any test, don't ever say to yourself, "This must be who I am." (No, no, this must be who your family am.)

I grew up in the Bolles family (surprise!) and they were all very "left-brained." I was a maverick in that family. I was right-brained. Fortunately, my father was an immensely loving man, who found this endearing. When I told him the convoluted way by which I went about figuring out something, he would respond with a hearty affectionate laugh, and a big hug, as he said: "d.i.c.k, I will never understand you." Tests are about families, not individuals. The results of any test are descriptors-not of you, but of your family-i.e., all those who answered the test the same way you did. The SAI family. Or the blue family. Or the INTJ family. Or whatever. The results are an accurate description of that family of people, in general; but are they descriptors also of you? Depends on whether or not you are a maverick in that family, the same way I was in mine. These family characteristics may or may not be true in every respect to you. You may be exactly like that group, or you may be different in important ways.

2. Don't try to figure out ahead of time how you want the test to come out. Stay loose and open to new ideas.

It's easy to develop an emotional investment that the test should come out a certain way. I remember a job-hunting workshop where I asked everyone to list the factors they liked about any place where they had ever lived, and then prioritize those factors, to get the name of a new place to live. We had this immensely lovable woman from Texas in the workshop, and when we all got back together after a "break" I asked her how she was doing. With a glint in her eye she said, "I'm prioritizing, and I'm gonna keep on prioritizin', until it comes out: Texas!" That was amusing, as she intended it to be; it's not so amusing when you try to make the test results come out a certain way. If you're gonna take tests, you need to be open to new ideas. If you find yourself always trying to outguess the test, so it will confirm you on a path you've already decided upon, then testing is not for you.

3. In taking a test, you should just be looking for clues, hunches, or suggestions, rather than for a definitive answer that says "this is what you must choose to do with your life."

And bear in mind that an online test isn't likely to be as insightful as one administered by an experienced psychologist or counselor, who may see things that you can't. But keep saying this mantra to yourself, as you read or hear the test results: "Clues. Clues, I'm only looking for clues."

4. Take several tests and not just one. One can easily send you down the wrong path.

People who do a masters or doctorate program in "Testing and Measurement" know that tests are notoriously flawed, unscientific, and inaccurate. Sometimes tests are more like parlor games than anything else. Basing your future on tests' outcomes is like putting your trust in the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.

5. In good career planning, you're trying, in the first instance, to broaden your horizons, and only later narrow your options down; you are not trying to narrow them down from the outset.

Bad career planning looks like this:

Most computerized tests embody the idea of starting with a wide range of options, and narrowing them down. So, each time you answer a question, you narrow down the number of options. For example, if you say, "I don't like to work outdoors," immediately all outdoor jobs are eliminated from your consideration, etc., etc.

A model of good career planning looks like this, instead: Good career-choice or career planning postpones the "narrowing down," until it has first broadened your horizons, and expanded the number of options you are thinking about. For example, you're in the newspaper business; but have you ever thought of teaching, or drawing, or doing fashion? You first expand your mental horizons, to see all the possibilities, and only then do you start to narrow them down to the particular two or three that interest you the most.

So, what's a good test? All together now: a test that broadens to show you new possibilities for your life.

And, what's a bad test? Again, all together: a test that narrows the possibilities for your life. Often this is the result of a counselor's interpretation of a test, or rather misinterpretation.

I'll give you an example: I met a man who, many years before, had taken the Strong Inventory.3 He was told, by his counselor, that this inventory measured that man's native gifts or apt.i.tudes. And, in his particular case, the counselor said, the inventory revealed he had no mechanical apt.i.tude whatsoever. For years thereafter, this man told me, "I was afraid to even pick up a hammer, for fear of maiming myself. But there finally came a time in my life when my house needed aluminum siding, desperately, and I was too poor to hire anyone else to do it for me. So I decided I had to do it myself, regardless of what the test said. I climbed the ladder, and expected to fail. Instead, it was a glorious experience! I had never enjoyed myself so much in my whole life. I later found out that the counselor was wrong. The inventory didn't measure apt.i.tudes; it only measured current interests. Now, today, if I could find that counselor, I would wring his neck with my own bare hands, as I think of how much of my life he ruined with his misinterpretation of that test."

6. Testing will always have "mixed reviews."

On the one hand, you can run into successful men and women who will tell you they took this or that test twenty years ago, and it made all the difference in their career direction and ultimate success. On the other hand, there are the horror stories.

If you want to explore testing in any depth, there is an excellent course online, from S. Mark Pancer, at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, which can be found at http://tinyurl.com/coc3ftg. Pay special attention to Lectures 1 and 19.

If you like tests, help yourself. There are lots of them on the Internet. Counselors can also give them to you, for a fee; if you want one, shop around.

If you want to know where to start, you might try these tests, which are the ones I personally like the best: Dr. John Holland's Self-Directed Search. We saw this already in chapter 7 with the People petal but in case you don't recall, this is at www.self-directed-search.com and costs $4.95 to take online.

The University of Missouri's Career Interests Game, at http://career.missouri.edu/index.php/career-interest-game. This is based on a shortened version of the Self-Directed Search, namely my "Party Exercise." Well designed.

If you want further suggestions, you can type "career tests" or "personality tests" into Google, and see what turns up. You'll find lots and lots of stuff.

The Third Way to Change Careers:

Using the Flower Exercise

This pathway to changing your career is not very popular-compared, say, to the Internet, because it requires a lot more time of you, and a lot more work. I described it back in chapters 6, 7, and 8 (in case you're skipping around in this book, and haven't been there yet). It is a careful, thorough, step-by-step process, for ensuring that you are choosing a career that fits you like a glove: a dream career, or dream job, your mission in life, as it is often called. It is not for the faint-hearted or the lazy. But if the other ways to change careers don't turn up any careers that look interesting to you, you may end up being very grateful that there is this way. I get letters like this all the time: I have already benefited greatly from The Flower exercise. I found hope in having a second alternative after doing the homework.... The series of life-changing activities in this book has definitely helped me to better understand who I am, to further appreciate my talents, and to utilize the resources I have readily available.

So, just in case you haven't looked at chapters 6, 7, and 8 yet, let me quickly rehea.r.s.e here the steps involved in this way of choosing a new career: 1. You do the Flower Exercise (chapter 7), which gives you the basic building blocks of Who You Are, so you can match a career to You.

2. Then you put together on one piece of paper your five favorite transferable skills, and your three favorite fields of knowledge, and start informational interviewing (chapter 8) so as to find the names of careers that fit those building blocks (or "petals").

3. Along the way, you see if you can figure out how to combine your three favorite fields into one career, so as to make yourself unique.

4. Then you "try on" the jobs to see if they fit You, by talking to actual workers in the kind of career or careers you have tentatively picked out.

5. Then you find out what kinds of organizations in the geographical area that interests you (where you are already?) have such jobs.

6. Then you find out the names of actual organizations that interest you, where you could do your most effective work.

7. And, finally, you learn about those places before you walk in, or secure an appointment to talk to them about working there, whether or not they have a known vacancy at that moment.

The essence of what you're doing here is: look at your past, break that experience down into its most basic "atoms" (namely, skills), then build a new career for the future from your favorite "atoms," retracing your steps from the bottom up, in the exact opposite direction. This is ill.u.s.trated in the following model: To download a printable PDF of this image, please visit http://rhlink.com/para14026

The Fourth Way to Change Careers:

Changing a Career in Two Steps

This is not so much a way to identify a new career, as a way to move into that career, once you have figured out where you want to go next. This is a plan that has worked very well for many career-changers: changing careers in two steps, not one.

And how exactly do you do that?