“If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life … ride your strengths … find your passion … do what you love … you can do anything you set your mind to…”
These platitudes are stock phrases that are still very visible in career advice circles. Of course, they make sense on a superficial level. They are like career affirmations.
The problem is that they miss the most important question of how. Much like saying we wish we were billionaires, Olympic athletes, or lottery winners, they are day-dreams and fantasy unless we can figure out how.
Explore this SecEd series: Careers advice and entering the workplace
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- Part 1: The future of jobs: What will work look like in 2034? Published April 30, 2024
- Part 2: Helping students to consider early career goals: Three exercises (this article)
- Part 3: Preparing students for workplace expectations: Two exercises. Published May 14, 2024
- Part 4: Finding your first job after school: Three exercises. Published May 21, 2024
From platitude to pragmatism
So how do we push beyond clichés? If we are looking to help students to think about careers, do we start with available jobs and work backwards? Or do we start by searching for an individual’s strengths and draw lines to careers that might best leverage them?
While jobs are dynamic, fighting for a cause seems to be an important ingredient in successful careers. If we are clear why we need to work and what we expect to get from it, then we are more likely to succeed; our motivations transcend a specific job to encapsulate some grander more compelling need.
It is tempting to now discuss finding purpose. The trouble we find is that it is often something that emerges over time. Not everyone is clear that they have a purpose, or at least not one that is translatable into a career. Some might even argue that purpose only really makes sense if you have successfully navigated your primordial needs.
We believe the key to helping students to start to explore practical career paths is to open an enquiry into their emerging needs, wants, aspirations, and limits.
We think the very best careers don’t follow a prescriptive plan. It is of course great if someone knows with certainty at age 13 what they want to do for the rest of their lives. However, in our experience, most people evolve their careers, changing direction sometimes quite radically depending on the opportunities they are presented with and their own advancing needs.
Exploring where to start
Consequently, we have designed the following exercises to help stimulate the right kinds of reflections, research, discussion, and experimentation.
We think it is hard to know with certainty what profession will be a good fit for you years in advance. So we tend to recommend thinking about possibilities and then trying a few. Here are some exercises:
1, Personal inventory: A baseline to be refreshed as you go
Ask students to write down answers to the following questions:
- What do you need from a job – what is the minimum it must deliver/enable for you?
- How much do you care about the kind of work you do; how much do you care whether the work is in service of something important?
- Do you have a clear view about what you want to achieve in the next five to 10 years? What is it?
- What are your red lines? Are you prepared to entertain any job/profession or work conditions to achieve points 1 through 3 or do you have a clear idea of the sorts of companies or behaviours you would not tolerate?
We often suggest a similar exercise for people who are five to 10 years into their careers. It is a good exercise to help expose any false pretentiousness bought on by peer pressure, or it can be simply an acknowledgement that they are still driven by more primordial needs.
Desired Outcome: We want to give students permission to declare that they are not clear yet about what they want to do and reassure them that this is okay – that perhaps any respectable job with a certain salary looks good to them. Over time this will change but for a lot of people this emerges only after they have worked a few years.
2, Framing spheres of interest: Activities, causes, contribution
Our goal here is to begin a conversation with students about what they love to do, what they are passionate about changing, and how either could be linked to a career. We want to start with a long list.
Take two pieces of paper. On the first draw two columns. The first column should be a list of things they love to do (write, sports, theatre, travel, TikTok, etc). Next to this we want to list possible ways their interest could become a sustainable profession.
On the second piece of paper, two further columns. In the first list causes that interest them. They may be consequential global issues or more local/personal challenges. Against each cause, in the second column, we then want to brainstorm at least one thing they can imagine contributing.
The value of this exercise is in creating a dialogue in class, with teachers, with parents, or with a business mentor. This exercise can be undertaken over a month or much longer. The power is in the iterative process of discovery between students identifying issues and then debating how they might refine their ideas.
Desired outcome: Creating a list of career destinations to explore and concrete ways they could choose a point of entry.
3, Experience the career multiverse: Try things on for size
We overlook the opportunities to do things now, in parallel with school work. The people who find the transition from school to professional life the easiest are those who didn’t wait for a deadline or starter’s gun.
Set a challenge (age-appropriately) for students to do one of the following during a three to six month period:
- Volunteer for an NGO (there are match-making websites out there, such as volunteermatch.org).
- Participate in a scholastic business plan competition (again, search online for options).
- Job shadow in a profession of interest.
- Solve a business problem for their family.
- Look for formal and informal internship opportunities (again, lots of websites are out there to facilitate this).
- Look for part-time work opportunities.
It is essential that this exercise is carefully supervised to ensure oversight through the selection, participation, and any post-completion closure.
Each student should be asked to complete a version of exercises 1 and 2 specifically tailored to any volunteer work. We want to ensure that they don’t just volunteer hours but use the experience to iterate the bigger questions of what they need, want, aspire, and see as limits.
Desired Outcome: To reinforce the power of doing things in parallel, to build resilience to the often more mundane realities of work, to build some resume experience, to reflect on points of possible interest for full-time careers, and to build networks to leverage after graduation.
There is a career our there for everyone
Let us leave you with one final thought about students starting the process of thinking about jobs, professions, careers, and life beyond school. If we rewind to our own experiences in making the transition, it was easy to see it as some form of competition. A fight to get on the most prestigious banking graduate schemes, to get a management job offer from a household name firm, etc.
Forty years later, we can absolutely and categorically say that much of that was false, misleading, and counter-productive. However, the process eventually taught us about ourselves. About whom we really were, what we really wanted to do, even to come to terms with being much better at doing jobs we never dreamed about when we were in school.
What helped us along the way were the wise mentors, teachers, and bosses, who had the patience, tolerance, and commitment to help us find our way. We hope this series of articles will help you to do the same for your students.
- Dr David Oxley and Dr Helmut Schuster are co-authors of A Career Carol: A tale of professional nightmares and how to navigate them, (Austin Macauley Publishers). Visit www.drsschusterandoxley.com/books