Career Decision Making
And what is a career anyway?
Having conversations with people about their work has been a lifelong interest of mine, and being able to expand that conversation into a college course and a newsletter has been a fun prospect so far.
As I mentioned on LinkedIn, this newsletter grew out of an opportunity I have to develop a course for students in the College of Arts & Sciences at UVA. The course is about navigating complex decisions in work and career, and is part of UVA’s new Catalyst Program, which is designed to help liberal arts students flourish after graduation.
When I learned about this program I wanted to participate in some way because I know how much I would have benefitted from it when I was an undergrad at UVA. As an English major, I knew that I liked reading and writing and well articulated ideas, and I had no concept of how I might translate any of that into a job or a career. I guess I wanted to be a writer? But even that was a vague notion that I had no idea how to pursue. When many of my friends came back 4th year with job offers and signing bonuses and what seemed like really clear career paths (lot of Comm school folks), I felt like I’d missed the boat.
In the years since, I’ve gotten a PhD in consulting psychology (think the overlap between organizational and counseling psychology), and spent the past decade researching, writing, and consulting on the psychology of work and leadership.
One thing I’ve learned, and where I think I’d like my course to start, is that we’re never really taught how to think about work or careers.
What is a career exactly? We treat it like a tangible thing we can manage. I suppose that’s why we call it a “career decision,” or “career coaching.” I think this phraseology can be misleading at times because it fails to account for how abstract a career really is, and how much more abstract it has become in our cultural moment.
It also fails to acknowledge the reality (to borrow from Kierkegaard) that a career is something that can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. We look back at our work experiences and we impart them with patterns and a sense of progression, even inevitability, and call it a career. I believe this is one of the first issues that makes it hard to think effectively about work. We apply an amount of certainty to a decision making task that is fundamentally uncertain and characterized by limited information. And because we’re asked questions about work and career constantly, this thinking is continually reinforced, especially in college students and young adults where work decisions loom large and the consequences feel monumental.
Depending on where you are in the country, “what do you do?,” will probably be the first or second question someone asks when they meet you for the first time (with your parents it may be every time...). And for all of the time and attention we give work socially, if you ask someone “what is work?,” or “what does work mean in your life?,” or even “what is a good career?,” I propose that you’ll get one of 2 responses: 1) a blank stare, or 2) the start to an interesting conversation.
We don’t tend to have ready-made answers to these questions because we’re never taught that we should think about them. And we’re not taught that thinking about these questions can help us to navigate complex decisions about our work and how our work fits into our lives over time. I suspect this is why so many people are disengaged, in career paths they dislike, and/or simply unsure about what they should do next with their lives.
Which brings us to the name of this course: What Should I Do with My Life?
I like this name for many reasons:
Hopefully it will attract a few students
There’s a whole lot that can be unpacked from that one question (more on this next time I think), and
I distinctly remember sitting in my apartment in NYC a few months after graduation, having realized almost immediately I had made a bad decision about work, and typing that very question into Google.
I wish I could go tell myself in that moment that choosing the wrong job is no disaster. That there are ways to make better decisions about work, and that even the missteps have value.
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The first book I’m reading as I prep course material is Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the two Stanford professors who have been teaching a course in Stanford’s d.school of the same name. Since they’ve been teaching this material for more than a decade, I figured it would be a good place to start thinking about how a course can help shape students’ thinking about work and life.
One thing that is sticking with me so far is their encouragement to develop an explicit “workview” (p. 34). Sitting down and writing answers to questions such as:
Why work?
What’s work for?
What does work mean?
What defines good or worthwhile work?
These are the types of questions we’re never really given the space or the encouragement to consider in our education (at least I wasn’t!), and they’re critical things to think about as we make career decisions that will lead to more flourishing. It can be intimidating to try to put words to questions like this - one practice I’ve found useful in that regard is setting a timer (say for 5 minutes) and just writing down stream-of-conscious whatever comes to mind. Don't edit yourself, just focus on writing continually for the full 5 minutes. It may not provide an answer, but it’s a good place to start.