When it comes to career advice, it seems that everyone has some. The trouble is figuring out who to listen to. Most people field advice from friends, parents, teachers and significant others. John Clark, a music producer and sound engineer, even found information technology consultants tossing advice his way.
Before you tell everyone to shut up, consider the idea that there is no bad advice, just people who are bad at sifting advice. Which means if you want to figure out the career that's right for you, get good at sifting.
Rosalind Hoffa, director of the Amherst College Career Center says, “Approach many people and gather all sorts of information. No one has the absolute answer. So the best way to proceed is to explore and experiment.” When it comes to finding the right career, “Everyone has the answer inside them and unlocking it is the question.”
Clark reports that, “The best advice I ever got was from my parents. They told me to follow my heart. They also showed me where my talents are by recognizing a love for music and giving me piano lessons early.”
When sorting through input remember each person has their own perspective, including your parents. Someone who values power gives advice that leans toward the acquisition of power, and someone who values work-life balance steers people toward that. You need to know your own values to figure out how each person's input applies to your situation.
The advice Clark received in college was about performance, because at Tufts, where he was, that's what studying music is all about. Clark tuned out the advice and took pre-med courses with a big paycheck in mind. But sometimes career advice comes in odd packages, and for Clark, it was an award. The first piece of music he produced received national honors, and he realized he had talent for advising musicians artistically and arranging music.
If you know yourself very well, sorting through career advice will be a breeze. The problem is, how can you know yourself that well before you are 70 and your career is over? Even people like Clark, who were raised to focus on their inherent skills, still have trouble figuring out their true calling: After college he took a job creating PowerPoint presentations.
For some people, especially those with patience to spare and money to burn, trial and error will work. And even if you are surrounded by friends who are as lost as you are, you still might find them useful: Hoffa says, “Friends can be a great resource. Sometimes just hearing yourself talk it out with friends is helpful.” Eventually, Clark's friend told him to take an internship at a music studio.
A faster way down the difficult path of career self-knowledge is to take an aptitude test. Deirdre McEachern, of VIP Coaching, says that a career aptitude test can tell you where your strengths lay. She gives her clients the Highlands Ability Battery, which takes three hours to complete and generates thirty pages of information. Other popular tests are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Strong Interest and Skills Confidence Inventory, each of which you can administer yourself via the Internet, though McEachern recommends you have a professional help you interpret your results.
McEachern's clients are generally people in their forties who wish they had come to her in their twenties, but some clients are as young as eighteen. “These people come to me to get help picking a college major,” she says. “Highlands test results don't change after age fourteen. Interests and motivations shift, but one's natural abilities are the same throughout life.”
But McEachern cautions that aptitude tests recommend a wide range of professions. So you also need to understand “your core beliefs and values.” To do this, McEachern asks questions such as: “If you could solve one world problem what would it be? What are the most proud moments of your life? What makes you angry in the world? What are traits you admire in other people?” And she doesn't just write down your answer. She also listens for intangible things like tone of voice and rate of speech. From this process she recommends a career you'd be good at doing that would satisfy your soul.
For those of you who cringe at the thought of hiring a coach or even sitting down for a test, trial and error might be right for you. The more experience you have making career decisions — good and bad — the better you'll get at making them quickly, effectively and on your own. Clinical psychologist Jason Greenberg advises people to go with their gut more often. “People don't listen to their gut. They listen to their head and other peoples' advice. The greater impact a decision has on one's life, the less likely the person is to trust their instinct.”
But the advice never stops, really. And you need to learn to take it. Because the biggest factor in career success, after education, is how effective your network of advisors is. And here's a piece of advice about taking advice from Clark, who now has a thriving business in a career he loves: “Have some humility.”
If you ask most people if they like their jobs, they’ll say yes. Alan Kreuger — scintillating economics professor at Princeton, whom I interviewed this morning — says that this is not because people have jobs they like, but because people have cognitive dissonance and are hard-programmed to like what they have.
On the positive side, this hard-wiring to be happy means that we can get through our days. Life is really difficult, and if we weren’t predisposed to think it’s fun, we would all jump off bridges. But Kreuger says that the cognitive dissonance could harm us in our work world if we could actually make a better decision for ourselves.
And, of course, most of us could choose better. If nothing else, you could look at the reams of new research I spew on this blog and make a decision about your job based on that. And here’s a little more research. Three more ways to think about career happiness:
1. Many people want fame, but it’s bad for you.
An article in today’s New York Times (read it now, because you’ll need a subscription in a few days) says that fame is a key motivator for people. Forty percent of people think they’ll be famous, but in reality, only one or two people in a hundred achieves fame.
Additionally, seeking fame will probably make you unhappy. “The participants in the study who focused on goals tied to others’ approval, like fame, reported significantly higher levels of distress than those interested primarily in self-acceptance and friendship. Aiming for a target as elusive as fame, and so dependent on the judgments of others, is psychologically treacherous.”
2. Rich people are not happier but they say they are.
Kreuger and a bunch of other economists and psychologists developed a new way to find out how happy people are — instead of asking them, have them report how they are feeling at short intervals throughout the day. The findings, published in Science magazine: More affluent people say they are, on balance, happier and less affluent people say they are, on balance, not as happy. But in fact, day in and day out, ones level of affluence does not make one happier.
3. Keep your commute short and your TV off.
Duh. These are so obvious, but so few people really do it. Which is the core problem with all this research. If you want to increase your happiness, you need to make significant changes in your life. Sorry. It’s bad news, but it’s true.
But it may console you to know that when I was talking to Kruger about how few people make changes –even though the advice stems from strong, scientific, psychological research — Kreuger said that when it comes to following advice “the psychologists are just as bad as everyone else.”
Quitting is not what it used to be. When a job was the sign of security, quitting meant you had a self-destructive streak. And when long-term employment was the only acceptable format for a resume, a string of quit jobs was a sign of an inability to get along with other people. Not so today.
Now, people have a new job almost every year before they turn 32. And with all the management-training courses about how to retain young employees, you can bet those young people are not getting fired. They’re quitting.
Today quitting is part of the process of finding your dream job, finding synergy between your home and work lives, and finding where you fit in. Young people have different expectations for work than older generations. A job today should feed one’s soul, ego, and sooner than later, family. It’s no surprise that you have to quit a lot of jobs to find the one that meets such lofty goals.
Yet with all the advice about how to get your dream job, there is a dearth of information on how to quit a job first. In a world where people change jobs constantly, and their network is the key to success, you have to quit as well as you hunt. Here’s a list of ways to quit a job well:
1. Go before things get bad.
Lynn recently left her accounting job. “I’ve been really good about quitting jobs amicably,” she says. “I realized I was hitting a point where I was going to start acting out.” Like Lynn, you need to know yourself and be honest about how you’re feeling on the job so you don’t let your emotions get out of hand.
2. Make a good first step.
“The very first person that you should tell you’re leaving is your boss,” says Alexandra Levit, author of They Don’t Teach Corporate in College. “Your boss will be insulted to hear it from someone else.” Also, get your story right the first time and tell the same, optimistic plan to everyone. Lynn, for example, explained that she wanted to give freelancing a try, which shows positive vision for her career.
3. Leave the door open a crack.
If you’ve done good work, there is no reason you couldn’t come back later, when things for you and for the company might have changed. Especially as you begin to specialize in your career and lay down roots, the pool of possible companies gets smaller. So don’t close any doors definitively.
“It’s very tempting to spill your guts or rant about the people you work with, but be careful what you say because you never know when you’ll want to come back,” says Levit.
4. Beware of the exit interview.
“If you trash the company during an exit interview, it will follow you everywhere. In fact, don’t even bother to do one,” says David Perry, a recruiter and author of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters. “Just leave on good terms and let them know you had a wonderful time.” Even if you didn’t.
5. Resignation letter.
Try to get out of it if you can. But if you really need to write one for legal reasons, make it short and gracious. You are not the president of the United States. The world does not need a public record of why you quit or what your aspirations are. Just a simple end date and a thank you will be fine.
6. Trust that the company can continue without you.
“People think the world is going to end if they quit their job,” says Lynn. “In my last job, everyone who quit thought everything would go wrong, but it’s easily fixed and everyone’s replaceable.”
7. Set yourself up for a good reference.
Perry is adamant that any negative parting will haunt your job hunts forever. “You want to be sure the trail you leave is a positive one,” he says. And although the law discourages past employers from dissing you to future employers, Perry says a recruiter can circumvent this hurdle. “I have never, in my 20 years of recruiting, had someone not answer questions about references.”
8. Manage the in-between time carefully.
“Burn no bridges,” warns Brendon Connelly, author of the popular blog Slacker Manager. Sometimes quitting a job is as loaded as dumping a lover. “I have quit a few jobs and there has been tension because it’s always been for something else,” says Connelly. “You need to lay the groundwork ahead of time for the transition.” Tie up loose ends at the old job and get your files organized to pass on to someone else. “You don’t want to give the old people the shaft.”
9. Be conscious of the shift in the balance of power.
The moment you quit is when you go from being your boss’s underling to your boss’s equal. After all, you are no longer beholden to your boss for a job. At the point of quitting, any more work you do for your boss is out of kindness and respect for the custom of giving notice.
This is one of those times we tend not to see ourselves clearly, writes Daniel Ames, professor at Columbia Business School. Hitting the right note of assertiveness — not too much and not too little — is hard to do. We notice poor balance in our colleagues but rarely notice it in ourselves. So keep in mind that the bottom line of quitting well is assertiveness. Have enough to leave when you need to, but tone down your assertiveness enough to keep your friends and colleagues on your side even as you’re walking out the door.
A book I’ve really liked recently was Will You Please Just F*ck Off, It’s Our Turn Now: Holding Baby Boomers to Account, by Ryan Heath. It’s about how baby boomers won’t admit when their ideas are old.
Here is a great example of this problem: Jack Welch (and Suzy Welch) writing ridiculous career advice that assumes generations X and Y have the same goals and aspirations that Jack Welch did. But he is old (maybe too old for that spritely wife Suzy) and definitely too old to be telling people to work like he worked, because no one wants to anymore.
Welch tells people to stay with a bad boss at a good company instead of going with a good boss to another company. The assumptions behind this advice are outdated. Welch assumes people usually stay at jobs for more than a year and a half (not true). He assumes everyone is hanging around to get a promotion (not true). He assumes people care more about a company name than what they learn there (really, really not true).
For a tirade against the continuous flow of irrelevant advice from people like Jack Welch, read Ryan Heath.
In response to my post about how to choose where to live, Ayann wrote a comment saying that race is a factor as well. She’s right. And the truth is that my husband and I talked about race constantly during our decision making process because he is Latino and, therefore, so are my kids.
My husband has spent his life living in Los Angeles and New York City. I had to push very hard for him to move to Madison, Wisc., where the Latino population is less than 5%. My husband’s hesitancy to move to an all-white neighborhood is understandable. His family is almost all first-generation immigrants, and the discrimination I have seen them face is incredible. I would have never believed how ubiquitous it was until I had seen it myself.
I have written about how research shows that my children will face discrimination in the workplace because of their Latino last name. But I want to believe that they’ll be fine in Madison — that somehow goodness will prevail and people will not discriminate.
City ranker Richard Florida has a race index, sort of. He counts the gay population as a guideline for tolerance for new ideas and diversity of ideas. Madison did not score incredibly well on this index. Madison is no San Francisco, to be sure. But it’s not Confederate flag-flying either. Madison, like most of us, is somewhere in between.
One of the quirks of my marriage is that my husband routinely points out to me how I say racist things. I don’t even notice it until he shows me. But I am pretty sure that most people are saying racist things, even if they don’t mean to. I must be uncomfortable talking about this because I wrote a whole piece on my decision making process and didn’t mention race once.
One of the best things we can do to squash racism is to believe in ourselves and in our neighbors that we can beat it. I’m doing that as I move to Madison. Another thing that helps fight racism is talking about it. That’s something we can do right here.
We are entering the age of volunteerism. Generation X has shifted charity from the hierarchical, corporate-backed methods of the Red Cross and United Way, to a grassroots, episodic volunteerism of, say, tutoring neighborhood children. And Generation Y is donating more of their time to charitable causes than perhaps any generation in history. According Leslie Lenkowsky, professor at The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, 90% of college-bound high school students volunteer.
Young people are determined to make a difference; they accept only a mission that is close to the heart and take action only when they can get their arms around the whole project. These attitudes affect choice of both charity and career, and increasingly the two overlap in ways that finally dignify the word “synergy”.
Melissa Krodman graduated from Boston University with a communications degree and joined a casting agency in England. But she found that industry was no match for her values. She wanted to do something larger in media, but she wasn't sure what. “Also,” she says, “I was faxing and doing things where I wasn't learning very much.” So she moved back to the United States to regroup, and she volunteered at What’s Up magazine.
Bruce Tulgan studies the working lives of young people, and he sees Krodman's criteria as typical for recent entrants into the workforce. “Mission is especially important for both career and charity, but then they want to know what they'll be doing. They ask, What will I learn? Who will I work with?”
In many cases, volunteering can add both mission and key experience to one's work life. Enter episodic volunteering: short-term, project-based, local, and hands-on, this is the type of charity that can improve your karma as well as your career.
Aaron Hurst is president and founder of the Taproot Foundation, which provides ways for people to donate their skills to discreet projects for nonprofit organizations. He says, “In the first ten or fifteen years of a career people have limited money giving ability but can give a relatively significant donation of time and skills. The average Taproot volunteer donates five to seven thousand dollars in work, and they could have never given that much in cash.”
For some volunteers, time with a nonprofit can shine light on a true calling. Krodman explains that, “For a long time I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. Volunteering at What's Up gave me a much more clear focus. What's Up introduced me to media that inspires activism. That's a part of the picture I didn't have.”
Even those who know their true calling can expand their skill set by volunteering for challenging projects. Hurst says, “Experiential learning is the best way to teach adults, especially when it comes to soft skills like leadership. Law firms have used pro bono work as a great training tool, and now it's spreading to other industries.” Hurst gives an example of a graphic designer for Hewlett Packard who had used the same font and colors for five years. Volunteering was a good way to stretch his design skills.
One of the most frustrating aspects of an entry-level job is the lack of responsibility. Krodman points out that volunteering is a good way to gain responsibility fast: “In an organization where you have bosses and work for someone else there is a certain amount of climbing you have to do. At What's Up, I am my own boss and I get to do work that I would not get to do at a big corporation until years down the line.”
And no matter where you are in your career, volunteering is a way to build a network. A typical Taproot branding project, for example, combines a project manager, brand strategist, graphic designer, and copywriter, each from a different company.
This benefit is not lost on Krodman. She used the contacts she made through volunteer work at What's Up magazine to find her ideal job — one that provides solid mission as well as solid salary. But what would she do if she landed that dream job and didn't have to work at cafes to pay rent? “Volunteer more,” she says. “There's so much to be done.”
Sarah Kenny wakes up at 5am six mornings a week to get to Back Bay Yoga where she practices ashtanga — a genre of yoga known for acrobatic lunges, feet tucked behind the head, and almost fifty pushups in one session. After that, she goes to work as a senior operations specialist. For Kenny, both pieces of her life are important. “I am good at my job and I am good at yoga and I had to figure out how to balance both,” she says.
One of the most liberating moments in career planning is to realize that you don't have to get paid to do your favorite activity in order to be happy. One of the constipating situations is to think there is only one career that can be fulfilling to you. Get rid of the idea that the most important thing to a worker is work, and you free yourself to make work just one portion of a fulfilling life.
Kenny's success comes, in part, from the fact that she has structured a life that caters to two aspects of her personality — the organized, office manager type, and the athletic, live-in-the-moment type.
Paul Tieger, co-author of the best-selling career guide, Do What You Are, advises that you pick a career based on your personality type, which nearly ensures that you'll have passion for what you do. Tieger's book helps you to understand yourself very quickly in a way that allows you to nail down your personality type and then find many careers that cater to it. You can even give the system a free test drive.
What is clear form Tieger's system is that a personality is multi-faceted, and a career need only cater the dominant aspects of your personality in order to be fulfilling. The passion you have that you won't get paid for is something you can do in addition to your job, and in the best scenario, each portion of your life caters to a different aspect of your personality.
The key to making this sort of life work, though, is finding a job that leaves room for a life. Kenny, for example, will not work at a company that does not respect her yoga schedule. Leslie Cintron, assistant professor of sociology at Washington and Lee University, says that workers like Kenny are not aberrations, “We have a generation that is clamoring for more balance in their lives.”
But this is a different sort of balance than the baby boomers aspired to. According to Cintron, “Baby boomers were talking about issues that they had to deal with when women moved into the workforce and polices didn't acknowledge that fact. Today one difference is that men in their 20s also are saying they want balance. They want extra space to be able to develop themselves as individuals.” Another difference is that baby boomers asked, “Can we work and have a family?” The new generations ask, “Can we work and have a life?”
For some people, “having a life” means having time for friends or developing a connected relationship. Other people might seek meaningful pursuits outside of work, such as a particular sport or extensive travel. Whatever “having a life” means to you, take solace in the fact that you don't need to get paid for it, you just need to find an employer who will give you room for your personal passions.
Be bold when it comes to getting what you need. Ask yourself what parts of your personality you need to address. Ask your employer to accommodate your non-work needs. The new generation is rife with people like you. Management advisors across the country are warning companies that if they don't make the workplace flexible they will face a shortage of willing workers.
Trust yourself to identify your personality type and your passions, and have the confidence to require that your employer afford you space to grow. Cintron encourages asking, even if it looks like a risk: “There is a lot of untapped flexibility that might be offered if one makes that first attempt to ask.”
Tread very carefully near a company that will not give you enough control over your time to enable you to pursue passions outside the office. Having control over your time and your work are some of the most important factors in job satisfaction; it is almost impossible to be happy in a job that gives you no control.
After a short blogging hiatus, I made it to Madison. I can’t tell you that my happiness levels have changed dramatically, but I’m optimistic. And, after decidedly UNhappy traveling with two young kids, I’m ready for a little normalcy, which for me is blogging at midnight…
A company fired someone via text message (thanks for the link, Tommie). A lot of bloggers have written about this event, and mostly people complain about the company and how bad it must be.
There is a saying that there is never one crazy person in a marriage. I have found this to be true — that it takes a crazy person to marry a crazy person and just because it LOOKS like one person is crazy doesn’t mean the other isn’t crazy in a more private way.
The same is true for companies. Who takes a job at a company that fires people via text message? And, if you do take a job at a company like that, if you are not crazy, you leave. If you have stayed long enough to be fired by text message you are as crazy as the person who sent the message.
It used to be that people moved to where their job was. But where you live has a lot of impact on how happy you are. So it makes sense that today people pick a city first and then find a job, and cities maven Wendy Waters thinks this trend will increase. I will be part of this trend on Monday, when I move.
I have spent the last six months studying statistics about cities and matching them with statistics about happiness. This is serious scientific research that is changing how universties teach and how city planners think.
Here are the two guiding principles of my research:
1. People are very bad at predicting what will make them happy.
We overestimate how bad the bad will be, for example. We think we will be really sad if we lose a leg, but in fact, people who lose a limb are not any sadder, as a population, than people who have not lost a limb. I learned this from an interview with Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, and I quote him so often he is practically my guest blogger.
2. The studies about happiness will most likely apply to me (and you).
This I also learned from Gilbert. He says that even though most people think they are exceptional, most people are normal. Of course. That’s what normal is. But most football players think they are above average (they are not) and most people think they are below average jugglers (they are not). We are all basically average. (You can read more about this in his book, which I also constantly hype.)
Here are the two things that I thought were most important when we talk about the intersection of geography and happiness:
1. People are happy if they earn what their friends earn.
Relative income, rather than any certain level of income, affects well-being, according to Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for applying the principles of psychology to economics.
I remember a piece I read in the New York Times (which would be a link you’d have to pay for so I’m not even going to bother looking for it.) It was a story about how real estate agents know way too much about their clients. One agent talked about when a husband and wife were looking for summer rentals in the Hamptons. They walked into a five million dollar home and the wife said, “We wouldn’t have to live like this if you’d get a decent job.”
It’s not about how much you have, it’s about how much your friends have. So you should live in a place where you will have as much money as the people you meet. My husband and I are constantly examining our jobs and our childcare setup, so I know we need a city with a low cost of living in order to guarantee that we never fall below the median during our trials and errors.
2. You will like what other people like.
I want good schools because I have two young kids. I checked out lots of school rankings. The more I pored over these different rankings, the more I distrusted them. Every list had different results, and the whole process seemed to be pretty subjective.
Gilbert is doing a study right now that shows that if you want to know if you should date a given person on Match.com, ask the last person he dated. If the last date liked him then you will like him. So I decided that choosing a school district is like dating, and the most important thing in picking a school is that other families love the school district.
Finally, as a tie-breaker, I looked at how economic development experts rated cities. I love the economic development people because their job is to think about how to leverage the community to make life vibrant.
I focused on the rock star of economic development, Richard Florida. He ranks cities according to how creative they are. You can search by topics like how technology-oriented the city is(technology=innovative business), or how gay it is (gay=diversity=open minds for new ideas). Each city gets a score that reflects the level of creative thinking among its population.
So, where did I choose? Madison, Wisc.
Madison is inexpensive, the people who live there love the schools, and the city comes up on best places lists all the time.
For all the research I’ve done, though, I have no idea where to live within the city. So it’d be great if there’s a Madison native out there who could post some suggestions.
ASAP: a ubiquitous term coming from senior bankers. You might assume it means as fast as humanly possible, as in an all-nighter if necessary. But this is not always the case. For example, sometimes it seems asap is just a banker’s best effort at using the word please. As in: Leave a printout on my chair asap.
I've taken to differentiating between the lower case asap, which means whenever I can get around to it, and the all caps ASAP, which means drop everything else. I figure if a senior banker makes the effort to put ASAP in caps, he might actually mean it.
And there’s no ASAP like the Sunday morning ASAP: A favorite senior banker trick to make sure the team is pleasing the client is to send out an unsolicited email to the client promising something by a specific time without consulting the people who actually have to do the work. I've been woken up on a Sunday morning to a voice mail saying we've promised the presentation to the client by noon, so I should get into the office and crank it out ASAP. Oh, and there better not be any mistakes.