I’ve been writing this newsletter for just over a year now. If you’ve been around here since then, you know this all started as a way for me to process and document some of what I was putting into my course on career decision making. I would tell people I was teaching a class called Navigating Complex Decisions in Work and Career, and they would say, “can I take it?”
I liked that idea, and a newsletter seemed like a relatively efficient way to stay in touch on what I was thinking about.
What has emerged here in the intervening time has been a bit different than the trajectory of the course though. Teaching about work decisions at the undergraduate level raised lots of interesting challenges and questions for me about how to effectively communicate these ideas to people with very limited work experience. In many ways the demands of the course pushed me to be more concrete and pragmatic, while my writing interests pulled me in more abstract, existential directions.
For example, these are the top 5 posts (according to the Substack algo at least) from the past year:
Another realization I’ve had while teaching the course is that the lecture format puts odd pressure on the content. A lecture assumes that a knowledgeable (or at least believable) individual is providing information that is accurate or of use in some way. I suppose I’ll leave it to my students to decide whether that condition was met, but it raises an interesting question about the content that one might encounter in a career decision making course. Specifically, is there a “right way” to make these decisions?
A central tenet of my class is essentially that values-focused decision making, applied to work and career, will increase the likelihood of flourishing over the long-term. But because values are culturally relativistic, and flourishing will necessarily mean different things to different people, the competency being taught here is a sort of meta-competency - not exactly making decisions about work, but how to think about making decisions about work. Which means I can’t exactly evaluate whether someone’s answers are right or wrong per se, but can perhaps observe their ability to read for ideas, draw them out, and reflect on them.
This is a very long way of saying, if I’ve had some measure of success on that front, no one will know it for years.
Naturally, this has all gotten me thinking about whether this course could be adapted into some sort of online resource, or a cohort-based coaching group for people with more work experience. Can the structure and content of a syllabus be layered in with the strategic and existential conversations that emerge more in mid-career to - wait for it - help people navigate complex decisions in their work and career?
I think there’s something useful here, and I’m curious what you think. Leave a comment below, or express your specific interest here. I’d love to hear from you.
So much to unpack here (including a very clever title). I may not feel sufficiently well situated to offer input, Ross, but I am curious... When you ask, "Can the structure and content of a syllabus be layered in with the... conversations that emerge in mid-career to help people navigate complex decisions in their work and career?"... are you more interested in whether we readers think its doable, or whether we believe there's an audience for it that will actually register for such a course (or both)?