CAREERS LESSON 1 CAREER PLANNING

LESSON

It is said that most people change careers at least three times in their lifetimes.
That might sound overwhelming, but consider that it covers everyone in this
country from folks with a high school education or less to those with a PhD;
from those in business management to those teaching graduate classes at top
universities. It includes part-time and full-time workers; it includes those who
work in a traditional office setting and those who work in nontraditional locations.
It even covers those who work for others vs. those who are self-employed.

Because career planning today offers such a wide variety of occupational
choices, it would take a complete lesson for each possible job to give you a full
picture. Thats why, in this series of lessons on Careers, well offer an overview
of some of the most popular choices. Well try to clarify the differences between
educational preparation needed for specific areas, disciplines, and even
occupations.

Now, some career planning tools and questions are consistent throughout the
labor market: those are the ones well cover in this lesson. The common theme
is to determine which occupation is right for you! They involve ways to gather
information about potential choices, ways to gather information about yourself
and your likes, dislikes, and aptitude, and general ways to approach career
planning.

LEARNING ABOUT YOURSELF

One of the first pitfalls that people fall into when planning a career is to start out
with the careers instead of with themselves. As we all know, most of us can
easily fool ourselves into believing certain things often about our own
personalities, attitudes, aptitudes, and characters. If you start with specific
careers, you might end up narrowing your choices based on various opinions
such as what you THINK you are good at, rather than what you actually ARE
good at.

So make sure to start your career planning by better understanding yourself:
your own needs, likes, dislikes, goals, plans, character, personality, and so on.
Throughout the entire process, make sure to remember that life has a way of
changing our best plans. You might begin training or education, take a class for
fun, and find that your love for the new subject changes your plans. Or you might
fall in love and get married, knowing that years of medical school, internships,
and residency programs might not be the best thing for your new relationship.

To start the process, then, ask yourself some basic questions about YOU:
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What is your current life situation? If you choose a career that requires
additional education, would you need to work as well? Full or part-time? Will
you soon be looking after babies, children, or even elderly parents that might
require more time than some occupations will allow?

What are your general plans in life: marriage, big family, no children, freedom
to travel, early retirement, etc.? What income range would be acceptable to
fulfill those goals?

What are your personal values or ethics? For example, are you religious?
Do you care tremendously about the environment? Do children always come
first? Are the underprivileged classes near and dear to your heart?

How do people fit your work style preferences? That is, do you prefer to work
alone or in groups? Do you like dealing with people or do you wish they
would all go away and leave you alone to get your work done? Are
coworkers okay, but you dislike dealing with the general public?

Are you more traditional and prefer structure or do you like surprise and
variety? For example, would self-employment be an option for you? Do you
want consistent daily activities that you can learn and become expert at or do
you prefer constant change and learning new things?

What are you good at vs. what subjects seem to immediately construct a
mental block in your brain the minute you even think about them?

Once you have answered these questions, rate them from the most important to
the least. Far too many people choose something less important as their main
criteria in a career planning search. The most common one is pay. Of course
we are all impressed with visions of dollar signs, but be realistic if you want to
be able to take time off whenever you want during hunting season in the Autumn,
you probably dont want to go into teaching, where Autumn is the beginning of
new school year. If spending time with family and friends is very important in
your life, you probably dont want to be an Accountant during the first few months
of the year or a Biomedical Engineer who will need to spend long hours in the lab.

You can use many different resources for answering some of these questions
dont just depend upon your own judgment, although thats always the place to
start. Remember, we often fool ourselves into believing things about ourselves
that arent quite true. For a more accurate answer, consider asking friends,
family, and current and previous coworkers about what you are like, and try out
some aptitude tests at the local community college or university. You can also
find many of these for free at different websites, but take the results from various
websites with a grain of salt. The more formal testing at colleges is likely to be
more accurate because the personnel have probably been trained in the area of
counseling and testing and the tests themselves are standardized and have been
through many revisions cycles to make them the best they can be. After you
have determined what you need and want out of a career, THEN begin
investigating some of your possible choices to see how well they match.


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LEARNING ABOUT CAREERS

NOW you can make a list of some of your potential choices, and begin to
investigate each one ask the same types of questions about the career as you
did of yourself. Also consider how the field is changing, as well as some basic
questions that are pretty common to most occupations, such as pay scale and
arena.

One important point to consider with any potential career is how it is changing
over time. Modern marvels have changed the face of much the labor market,
the most obvious being technology, computers, and the Internet. The Age of
Information has not only opened new career and occupational choices, it has
impacted virtually every career available today. Knowledge of standard
computer operations such as word processing, spreadsheets, email, and the
Internet have become decidedly soft job skills as opposed to hard ones these
days. Assisting in the creation of a global economy, the Internet has also provide
astounding opportunities for virtual offices and outsourcing that were never
before possible. Similarly, technology has changed the face of communication
completely, and speed has become one of the key goals of customer service as
a result.

To begin the investigation process on career choices, understand that career is
a broader term that includes many specific occupations within each one. Each
career might include several disciplines, levels, or both. For example,
Engineering careers fall within many disciplines such as Chemical, Nuclear,
Aeronautic, etc. Another important point to consider about any potential career is
whether you would prefer to specialize in a particular discipline or attain cross-
training and become multidisciplinary. Again, it all depends upon two things:
how well the career, disciplines, and occupations you are considering match your
needs and how well you will be able to fit the needs of the labor market. A
multidisciplinary approach allows you more opportunities and variety, but do keep
in mind that, usually, it also requires more education.

Careers also include different levels of educational requirements. Again, using
Engineering as an example, most actual engineers have a minimum of a four-
year university degree, but designers, drafters, technicians, and so on might
have received their educations at trade schools or even through on-the-job
training. And thats not even considering tangent occupations and careers such
as Quality Control Specialists or management. Interestingly, various lower
levels in certain disciplines and careers are paid as much and sometimes more
than what are commonly considered upper levels. So dont automatically
assume anything about a particular occupation or career. Investigate it, instead
you might be surprised at the opportunities, and you might realize a way to
create your own innovative niche!


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The rest of the lessons in this series should give you some basic places from
which to start. We try to give an overview of the above elements for various
common careers and occupations. Make sure to ask questions about each
possible occupation that will shed light on how they might affect the most
important criteria you determined when learning about yourself. Lets try to group
the questions you might ask about a particular occupation into categories:

Labor Arena Here you want to find out what areas are available in which to
work: government, business and industry, and teaching are the most
common.

Remuneration In this group of questions, you should see what the standard
pay scales are, as well as elements such as whether benefits, advancement
opportunities, or horizontal shifts (to management, sales, etc.) are available.

Atmosphere these are many of the same questions you asked yourself:
does it allow both working for others and being self-employed? Is it people or
paper oriented? What are the day-to-day activities like? Are a lot of travel or
long hours required? Will you be inside or outside?

Now, hopefully, you are on the final leg of figuring out some viable choices for a
career. Take the most important items from your own list and compare them to
the information you have found out about the various career and occupational
choices you investigated. FIND THE MATCHES! And then gain more
knowledge about those.

Ways to gain experience and knowledge about potential matches are usually
pretty easy to find:

Public Information Most colleges have very detailed occupational guides,

but you can also find a wide range of information and detail online and in
magazines. For example, U.S. News and World Report puts out a yearly
guide as to pay scales that can be expected for that years college graduates
in a variety of fields.

Shadow Find someone actually performing the occupation you are

interested in and gain permission to follow them throughout a typical day.
This works even better if you can extend it through a full week or two.

internships Especially in the government arena, unpaid internships are quite

common venues for gaining experience in a particular occupation while
investigating it. However, business and industry has a wide range of
internships as well.

Apprenticeships Dont forget that many established Masters in trade fields

will offer apprenticeships to people wanted to learn more about that specific
trade. One of the benefits of this route is that often they are paid positions.

Volunteer Work Never overlook the possibilities of volunteering within the

general career area that you are considering. The possibilities are virtually
endless!
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Copyright 2005 Money Instructor