Update on the list of best and worst professions

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There’s disconcerting news in CareerJournal today. They list the top ten professions, using generally the same criteria that Salary.com used to come up with its list of the ten best professions. And the only professions that are (only sort of) on both lists are: “analyst” and “social worker/psychologist”.

Analyst is such a broad term that it is almost useless, but it is conveniently something that requires almost the complete opposite skills as social worker/psychologist. So at least most personality types have an opportunity here.

Maybe the only really actionable advice on this topic comes from what has become one of my favorite sources for career advice, New York Magazine. Here’s a quote from a funny and informed lecture on happiness by Ben Mathis-Lilley:

“Don’t go to law school. Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other professions, and it’s not just because their jobs are more stressful. For most people, job stress has little effect on happiness unless it is accompanied by a lack of control (lawyers, of course, have clients to listen to) or involves taking something away from somebody else (a common feature of the legal system).”

That advice is not just for lawyers, it’s for everyone. Even if you can’t be an analyst or psychologist, at least get a job where you have control over your work.

What is control? For some people, it’ll mean working for yourself. But you can have control working for other people, too.

I asked David Blanchflower, professor at Dartmouth College who is known for slicing data to create happiness equations, “What does having control over one’s work really mean?”

He said that control goes beyond just workload and pace. “People don’t like to feel there’s a risk of being fired. They like control over what they wear, they want access to the heat control.”

Surprisingly, in study after study, women report more job satisfaction than men do. So maybe the biggest factor in whether or not you feel like you have control over your work is not whether you’re in a “best profession” but whether or not you’re a woman.

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The portfolio career: To find fulfillment try simultaneous careers

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Recently, Aaron Karo performed stand-up comedy in a string of sold-out shows. He also bills himself as an author, a public speaker, and a sitcom actor. Karo has always juggled a few careers. After college, he went to work for an investment bank. But he was also writing a weekly newsletter that had tens of thousands of subscribers. And he wrote a book.

About ten years ago, British management guru Charles Handy predicted that people would replace the idea of one, full-time job, with several different part-time occupations. He called this the “portfolio career,” and Karo provides a good example of how this trend is taking shape.

A portfolio career is not the same thing as holding down three bad jobs and wishing you could figure out what to do with yourself. Rather, it is a scheme you pursue purposefully and positively, as a way to achieve financial or personal goals or a mixture of both. This new type of career choice can include several highly skilled, professional posts, often mixing employment with self-employment, and volunteer work or learning work with fee-based work.

While there has been scattered adoption of the portfolio career among baby boomers, the idea is gaining a lot of traction among younger workers, even though they never use the term. As members of Generation X entered the workforce; two-thirds of them were looking for an alternative to full-time employment as a more efficient path to self-discovery and finding the right career. For people in their twenties and early thirties, a portfolio career is a means of getting to know oneself, hedging one’s bets, and protecting their quality of life.

Most people have skills that cross into more than one profession. And if you take any one of the popular personality tests offered by web sites and career counselors you will find that peoples’ personalities do not fit neatly into one type of profession either.

So the idea of having to choose one single profession is frequently unappealing. Ezra Zuckerman, associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told me, “A lot of people feel alienated when thy feel there is more to themselves that they have not shown [in their work].” Young people are particularly drawn to the idea of a career as a vehicle to fulfillment and self-actualization, so they are less apt than Handy’s generation to settle into one, narrow career.

The arguments for a portfolio career at the beginning of one’s adult life are clear. Professor of psychology at Harvard, Daniel Gilbert, told me that the best way to figure out what will make you happy is to try it. A portfolio career gives you the opportunity to try three or four types of work at the same time, and to keep switching out choices until you come up with a portfolio that you like.

Karo, for example, dropped the banking career when he stopped liking the daily suit-and-tie routine. And when I ask him when his next book is coming out, he hems and haws and it’s clear that the career as an author is not so appealing — at least right now.

The trick in all career decisions is to figure out the intersection of your skills and your passions. This is an ongoing process, not a final destination, so a portfolio of part-time careers is more conducive to this path of discovery than a single, eight-hours-every-day career. Andrew Zacharakis, professor at Babson College told me, “Passion is something you have to look for every day of your life. Your passion is likely to change over time but finding your passion is good practice. Part of the search for you passion should be a search to know what your skill set is. Ask parents, mentors, and friends. Try to mach skills you have with your passion.”

The problem with a portfolio career is that you run the risk being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none — a problem in terms of both money and fulfillment.

“The most secure portfolio careers are with people who have a fairly solid skill base that people will pay for,” says Ian Christie, career coach and author of the Bold Career blog. “You have to hang your hat on something. Either a functional skill, like accounting and you can be, say, a personal trainer at home. Or you need to find a market niche and provide a lot of services, such as training, development, outsource contracting, etcetera.

And you probably need a creative outlet in your portfolio. “When we are involved in creativity we feel that we are living more fully than in the rest of life,” says, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. Any work can include creative thinking, but, he told me, “if you want to be creative then you must learn to do something well,” To excel at something requires you to challenge yourself continually. Achieving high skill level at something is an important step toward fulfillment because, “most people want to think they have explored the limits of their potential.”

Karo says he receives a lot of email from people asking how they can follow their creative dreams. And his advice is, appropriately, the Instant-message-length version of Handy’s book-length theory: “You’ve gotta do it on the side. Diversify your revenue streams. Do what you’re passionate about.”

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A lesson from the 9/11 memorial, which still does not exist

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The most conflicted memorial just got more conflicted. The New York Times reports that the relatives of those killed on 9/11 will not endorse the World Trade Center memorial plan unless the names of the dead are categorized by where they were working. Relatives don’t just want the company name, though. They want the tower and the floor as well.

Many people will ask, Why? In a time when defining yourself by your work is so unfashionable, why do people want to remember loved ones by where they were working?

As someone who was at the World Trade Center when the towers fell, I can tell you that the way people recover from a trauma like this is we retell the story over and over again. I have never heard someone tell a story about being there and not say where they were working.

For one thing, it tells where you started, which is the biggest factor in determining if you lived. For another thing, those of us who were there that day reassessed our lives, and for many, the idea of work changed. If someone almost dies at work, work needs to have a lot of meaning if you’re going to go back.

I cannot speak for the families who had someone die that day. But if the people who lived are obsessed with where they were working, then it seems reasonable that families of those who died would be obsessed too.

The memorial will probably end up listing the names exactly how the families want. And the memorial will be a reminder to everyone that most of us spend most of our time working. Trauma victims are not the only people who tell stories. Everyone does. So make your time at work matter because it will always be part of your story.

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How to reach the new American dream

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American dream has changed. It used to be a college education, a steady job, a nice house (and a family to fill it), and a better financial picture than your parents. There is a new American Dream that is still about “doing better than your parents” but not in a financial sense. This dream is about fulfillment.

Boston-based artist, Ariel Freiberg, just got engaged, and she and her fiancé are gearing up for this new dream. “We were brought up to think it’s important to own a piece of property. It’s how you build your life in this country. But buying a house is not a major goal for us. It is not what will make our lives secure and it will not help us define ourselves.”

“The idea of the American dream is taken out from under us,” explains Anya Kamenetz, blogger and author of the book Generation Debt. “There used to be a contract with employers — healthcare, pensions, predicable employment,” but today there are none of those guarantees.

Additionally, the cost of a college education is far outpacing inflation, making it more difficult to make this first steps toward the American Dream, according to Tamara Draut, author of Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-somethings Can’t Get Ahead. The average student loans come to around $20,000, which means $200 a month out of an entry-level paycheck. On top of that between 1995 and 2002 median rents in almost all major cities have increased more than 50%.

Hillary Clinton recently gave a speech about how “a lot of kids don’t know what work is” and young people “think work is a four-letter word.” These were not renegade words, but rather an expression of the prevailing attitude among her fellow baby boomers.

The boomers mistake a rejection of their American Dream as a rejection of reality. But here’s some news: Young people know that work is a reality for everyone. It’s just that everyone needs to work toward something; so young people have a new American Dream.

“The new American Dream is much more entrepreneurial,” says Kamenetz. “And it’s about shaping ones own destiny: mobility, flexibility to do your own work and the ability to have a career as an expression of who you are as a person.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you craft your own version of the new American Dream:

1. Cushion an entry-level salary with a move back home.
The first step in restructuring the American Dream is to save money to ensure flexibility. Moving back with your parents is smart if you can do it. Most jobs are in big cities, and starting salaries simply cannot pay the rent in those cities. People who are not able to get subsidized housing from parents are much more limited in terms of their early career choices.

2. Get comfortable with risk taking.
The new American Dream is for risk takers. This is actually not groundbreaking in terms of the American Dream. For immigrants, the American Dream has always meant risk-taking. But today young people are taking risks that parents would have never dreamed of, like playing contact sports without any health insurance and signing up for a mortgage with a freelance career.

3. Protect your time.
The American Dream of Baby Boomers came at the expense of personal time and family time. Success is not having more things than your parents. It’s having more time. More time for hobbies, for travel, for kids. “It’s not about how much money you have, it’s about living your life on your own terms,” says Barbara Stanny, financial coach and author of Overcoming Underearning.

4. Don’t assume personal fulfillment requires a small career.
Sure, the new American Dream has nothing to do with financial studliness. But don’t sell yourself short in the name of personal time. “Higher earners with balanced lives don’t work more hours, they are just more focused,” says Stanny. “To make more money you don’t have to work more hours. There is a difference between settling for a low income and taking a job to feed your soul.”

5. Buy as small a home as you can.
You preserve the most options for your future if you can buy a home on one income. “The advice used to be: always buy the most expensive house you can afford because it’s an investment. Today it’s different. Buy only the amount of house that you need so it doesn’t become an albatross around your neck.” says Phyllis Moen, author of Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream.

6. Make decisions by looking inside yourself.
Be aware of the tradeoffs you’re making. For example, big cities are exciting and filled with career opportunity, but you pay a high premium for living there.

When talking about her decision to stay in Boston, Freiberg says, “There’s a certain vibration living in the city that feeds me and my fiancé — this inspiration is something that we can’t get in the suburbs.”

Choices are difficult today because the new American Dream is not as measurable as the old one. You cannot look at your bank statement or count your bedrooms to assess your success. The new American dream is about fulfillment, which is a murky, slippery goal, but young people like Freiberg know it when they feel it, and you will, too.

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Snoop on other people’s careers to gain self-knowledge

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We are bad at predicting what will make us happy, so the best way to pick a career is to study people to see if you like what their life is like. If you do, then try their career.

This is not very efficient, though. I mean, you can’t study that many people. So New York Magazine’s Watching the Clock is a gift for all you career searchers. You can read a minute-by-minute account of each person’s day.

Of course, it’s an account of their best day. No one reports anything like “1:36 pm put head on desk and worried about failure.” But still, you can learn a lot from reading about how someone really spends their day.

Also, you can learn about yourself by watching how you read the pages — you will read carefully what seems like the most fun to you. When I read, for example, I went first to the publicist, and relished every minute of his day. I even took pleasure the relentless pitching he did, within this piece, for his client, Bombay Sapphire. I skimmed the location scout’s day, and the contractor’s day. I read five scattered words about the chef’s day and they were all about food (who eats porchetta anyway?) and I couldn’t bring myself to read anymore. So no cooking school for me. Ever.

What if you like reading all of the profiles equally? Maybe you should be a librarian.

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Job hoppers have the best vacations

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The best thing about changing jobs is the vacation in between jobs. Most companies give two weeks vacation, which is about the amount of time you need to take off from work in order to keep your life running, e.g. flooded kitchen, dental appointment, weekday baseball games.

On top of that, most people aspire to the kinds of jobs where you are thinking about the job in the back of your mind all the time because it’s interesting to you and you’re passionate about it. So the only way to get a real vacation at most companies is to quit.

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday called A Life Between Jobs, which describes this trend as pretty much mainstream among Gen X and Gen Y: “Generations before them, studies have shown, valued tenure and career advancement. But this group sees the chutes in the world as interesting as the ladders.”

The best scenario, of course, is to quit and have another job lined up, because the stress of having to find another job puts a damper on the in-between-job vacation. But still, as long as you’re not in financial trouble, you can enjoy the time even without another job lined up as long as you trust yourself to get a job eventually. Which you should, because we are in a good economy for job-hunting right now.

Question the authority of anyone who tells you that this is a bad idea. There was a quote in the New York Times piece from a career advisor type about how, “Gaps in the resume are still a red flag.” But they are only a red flag if you spend your time sitting at home doing nothing.

No one wants to work with a person who does nothing with their time. That’s the sign of an uninterested person. But if you have gaps in your resume that you filled with fun adventures and rewarding projects then a gap in your resume is a red flag that you are balanced, interesting, and in control of your life. In this case, as long as you can explain the gaps in your cover letter, you’ll probably be fine.

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Visualize success like a major league all-star

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I read in the Boston Globe about this guy, Jim Fannin, who is a mental coach for hundreds of people, including twenty-two major league baseball all-stars. So I decided to interview him, thinking that I’d be able to implement his program for my own goals.

Most of what I know about mental coaching comes from my experience in professional beach volleyball. At the top of any sport, the difference between players is not physical skills because everyone has them. The difference is mental. Who can stay focused and believe in themselves during every game.

I couldn’t do that on the volleyball tour, and I know this shortcoming holds me back in my work today, too. So I was very curious about Fannin saying that he can teach people how to gain mental focus.

It turns out, that Fannin teaches people how to be top in their field by teaching one thing: Play a movie in your head of you achieving your big goal. For Alex Rodriguez it was being a top hitter. And he became the American League MVP. Not just in his own movie, but in real life.

Sounds easy, but for most people, getting to the movie is very hard. (Which is why Fannin wrote a book.) Here are the steps you have to take:

1. Know exactly what you want. A defined, very specific goal. Not “start a company” but “open a dog-grooming business in Portland.”

2. Know exactly what reaching the goal will look like — the steps leading up to the achievement. If your goal is to win a Nobel Prize, you need to imagine yourself making the great discovery.

3. Organize your life around your goal so that you can play your movie in your head before you go to bed and immediately when you get up. This means you need to get to some sort of meditative point where you can sit still, for maybe ten minutes, while you play your movie in your head.

4. Find optimism. Lots of it. Because you have to believe in yourself enough that you will actually do this exercise every day until you reach your dream.

I believe that this will work. It makes sense to me, and it’s worked for thousands of people. Not just athletes.

But this morning, when I woke up, I realized how hard it was going to be. I had no movie to play in my head and I had not set aside time in my schedule to day to plan what my movie will be. So I guess I’ll start tomorrow.

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Get married first, then focus on career

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Women who want to have kids should make it a high priority in their early twenties to find a partner. This week’s Newsweek cover story, Marriage by the Numbers, says is okay to wait until after 35 to get married. Newsweek is revising the saying that a woman has more chance of getting hit by a truck than getting married after age 35.

But the article ignores one of the most pressing issues facing Generation X: Infertility. No generation of women has had more trouble with fertility than this generation who received the terrible advice, “Wait. You have time. Focus on your career first.”

In fact, you have your whole life to get a career. This is not true about having a baby.

Even if you are past your early twenties, or not heterosexual, if you’re single and want to have kids with a partner, you need to find one now. Take that career drive and direct it toward mating because your career skills will outlast your ovaries.

In case you think you’re waiting for “the right time,” there is no evidence to show when in a woman’s career is best to have kids. At any point, she is thrown off track. At any point when a woman has kids, statistically she will start to earn less money even if she takes no maternity leave whatsoever. There is no evidence to show that it’s easier to take time out of the workforce at a certain point in a career. People just plain don’t know.

Phyllis Moen, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, told me in an interview, “Don’t wait until the right time in your career to have a child or it will never come.”

However there is lots of evidence to show that a woman’s biological clock takes a nose-dive at age 35. I know, because that’s when I started having kids. The geneticist showed me and my husband a graph of Down’s Syndrome and we nearly keeled over when we saw the cliff at 35. We had no idea. That Down’s Syndrome cliff, though, is a stand-in for everything, because a huge percentage of fertility statistics get bad at 35.

There is also lots of evidence to say that having kids at least two years apart is best for the kids. However there is a distinct advantage for first-born kids. They are richer, smarter, and as if that’s not enough, year after year 90% of Harvard’s incoming freshmen are first-born. You can mitigate the impact of birth order on your second child by having three years between kids.

If you start when you are thirty-one, you can have two kids, three years apart, before you’re thirty-five. But this plan does not take into consideration that about 20% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage. This means you have almost a 50% chance of having to go through three pregnancies to have two kids, which means you should start when you’re thirty.

If you want to have babies when you’re thirty, then you probably want to be married when you’re twenty-eight. This is good news because if you marry very young you’re more likely to get divorced, but the statistics get much better if you wait until you’re twenty-five. For a healthy marriage, experts think people should be married two or three years before they consider having children. A reasonable expectation is to meet someone, date for a couple of years, and get engaged with almost a year’s time to pull off a wedding. So you need to meet the person at age twenty-four.

So this means that it may make sense for men to work full-speed ahead on their career in their early twenties, but women cannot afford that. Women need to make time in their lives to search for a mate in the same systematic, focused way that women have been searching for careers in their early twenties. And don’t tell yourself you’re waiting until you know yourself better. Getting to know yourself is a lifelong process, and after age twenty-five, waiting to get married won’t decrease your chance of divorce.

The good news here is that a large body of research shows that you will gain more happiness by being married than by having a good job. Yes, you should not have to choose between a good job and marriage. But this column is not about what is fair or what is just. It is about what is real.

You have a biological clock that does not pay attention to issues of social justice. You cannot control your biological clock and you cannot control the workplace. But you can control where you spend your time and energy, and you should look hard for a husband early on. Line up the marriage first, then the career.

 

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Avoid off-shoring by being creative

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None of you should be concerned about jobs getting shipped off shore. That's because the jobs going off shore are jobs you wouldn't have wanted anyway. The highly creative, innovative, thought-leadership jobs are staying right here in the United States.

In an interview, Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind told me we are in the “conceptual age where key abilities will not be high tech but high touch,” the ability to make connections will matter most in an age where information is a commodity.

Some people have to worry about losing their job to a PhD earning $10 an hour in India: If you like to sit in a room and code without having to talk to anyone else, you will find yourself out of work. If you like to take orders and never want to have to risk being told your original idea is stupid, your job can definitely be done by someone who works when Californians are sleeping.

But take a good look at yourself. If your job is going overseas, then you probably are not being your best self at work. Because everyone is creative and everyone has a spark to share with the world. So take some time to find yours.

If you can only see yourself alone in a dark room, you are probably lonely. And if you can only see yourself taking orders, you are probably bored. You're just not admitting it. Don't tell me you are a genius. If you were a genius you'd find a way to be creative and save your job.

Forget the soul search; just do something

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When it comes to finding a career, the huge soul search is hugely overrated. At some point — usually much earlier than people think — you should just start doing something. Anything.

While the soul search is routinely touted in the self-help section of bookstores, it is not the most practical approach. The first problem with the soul search is that it takes forever. Literally. Knowing oneself is not an end game; it is infinite. So there’s no point in waiting until you “know yourself” to pick a career. The other problem with the soul search is that it assumes a soul mate. But with career choice, “there is no one right answer,” says Jennifer Floren, CEO of Experience.com. “The concept that there is one right job for someone is ridiculous.”

Take the pressure off career decisions by reminding yourself that there are many types of work each person could do and be happy. “People have multiple selves,” writes Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD in France. Different jobs will address different parts of ourselves at different periods in our lives. “In any of us there’s a part that’s very pragmatic and there’s a part that’s very creative, and there are times in life when we give more time and space and energy to one side than the other. But if it’s in you, eventually it kind of bubbles up, and it wants some airtime.” No one job can satisfy our whole personality, so stop aiming for that.

People coming out of college today will change jobs every eighteen months. That’s a lot of jobs, so choosing one is not that big a deal. If you don’t like it, it’ll be over soon. “It’s a waste of energy to focus on the negative consequences of a job search because there’s no such thing as a wrong choice,” says Floren. “Every step of a job search is a good step because you’re going to grow and you’re going to learn more about yourself and the world around you.”

Another argument for action over analysis is that sticking with the first job you pick is not as beneficial as moving around a bit. So making a choice you don’t like could be good for you. “The trend today is to get a broad perspective from working in different industries. This is a way to build a more layered network that will work for your future,” says Catherine Kaputa, a branding consultant.

When it comes to career schemes, we simply do not have accurate imaginations about what life will be like for us in different situations, said Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, when I interviewed him. Our most accurate information about what will make us happy comes from snooping in on other peoples’ lives to see if they are happy. And the best way to watch other people is to be in a variety of offices. Gilbert calls the informal process of judging other peoples’ happiness “surrogation,” and he says, “surrogation is the best way to predict if we’ll be happy. Observe how happy people are in different situations.”

So what DO you need to know before you make a decision? Figure out what was bad about the jobs you’ve already had so that you don't duplicate the problem. Then just start testing the waters — put a toe in the current to see how it feels. Then take a leap, and if you don’t like where you land, reframe your landing pad as just a stepping-stone. And start putting your foot in the water again.

Gilbert says, “We should have more trust in our own resilience and less confidence in our predictions about how we’ll feel. We should be a bit more humble and a bit more brave.”

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