What Color Is Your Parachute? (31 page)

If you don’t like tests, what can you do? Well, there’s a nice process for determining what to do with your life, later in this book
.
It’s called the
Flower Exercise
). It is in a test-free zone.

When you have to choose or change a career, here are seven rules to keep in mind:

Rule #1
about choosing or changing a career: go for
any
career that seems interesting or even fascinating to you. But
first
talk to people who are already doing that work, to find out if the career or job is as great as it seems at first impression. Ask them:
what do you like best about this work? What do you like least about this work?
And,
how did you get into this work?
This last question, which sounds like mere cheeky curiosity,
actually can give you important job-hunting clues about how you could get into this line of work or career.

Rule #2
about choosing or changing a career: make sure that you preserve constancy as well as change, during this transition. In other words, don’t change
everything.
Remember the words of Archimedes with his long lever,
⁵
loosely paraphrased as:
Give me a fulcrum and a place to stand, and with a lever I will move the Earth
. You need a place to stand, when you move your life around, and that place is provided by the things that stay constant about you: your transferable skills, your values, your character, your faith.

We can illustrate this principle about maintaining
some
constancy with a simple diagram of creative career change, below. Let us say you
are an accountant, in the television industry, and you want to become a reporter, covering medicine. You can, of course, try to change everything in one big leap (labeled
the difficult path
in this diagram), but that’s all change and no constancy. To preserve some constancy, you can first change just your job-title and only later your field. Or you can first change just your field, and only later your job-title (
two steps
). This two-step plan for career-change preserves
some
constancy at every turn, some continuity with the past—and allows you to always claim some past experience and expertise, each time you make a move.

Rule #3
about choosing or changing a career: you do better to start with yourself and what
you
want, rather than with the job-market, and what’s “hot.” The difference is “enthusiasm” or “passion.”

Rule #4
about choosing or changing a career: the best
work
, the best career, for you is going to be one that uses: your
favorite
transferable skills, in your
favorite
subjects, fields, or special knowledges, in a job that offers you your
preferred
people-environments, your
preferred
working conditions, with your
preferred
salary or other rewards, working toward your
preferred
goals and values. This requires thorough self-inventory. Detailed instructions are to be found in
chapter 11
.

Rule #5
about choosing or changing a career: the more time you give to the choosing, the better your choice is going to be. There is a penalty for seeking “quick and dirty” fixes.

Rule #6
about choosing or changing a career: you don’t have to get it right, the first time; it’s okay to make a mistake, in your choice. You’ll have time to correct it, down the road, regardless of your age. Most of us have three to five careers, during our lifetime.

Rule #7
about choosing or changing a career: this should be fun, as much fun as possible. The more fun you’re having, the more you can be sure you’re doing it right.

This builds upon a little-known truth in career-counseling or job-hunting:
“The clearer your vision of what you seek, the closer you are to finding it. For, what you are seeking is also seeking you.”
Sounds kooky, but I’ve seen it happen too many times, not to believe it. Okay, so how do you make your vision clearer?

Take a large piece of white paper, with some colored pencils or pens, and draw a picture of your ideal life: where you live, who’s with you, what you
do, what your dwelling looks like, what your ideal vacation looks like, etc. Don’t let
reality
get in the way. Pretend a magic wand has been waved over your life, and it gives you everything you think your ideal life would be.

Now,
of course
you’re going to tell me you can’t draw. Okay, then make symbols for things, or create little “doodads” or symbols, with labels—anything so that you can
see
all together on one page your vision of your ideal life—however haltingly expressed.

The power of this exercise is sometimes amazing. Reason? By avoiding words and using pictures or symbols as much as possible, it bypasses the left side of the brain (“the safekeeping self,” as George Prince calls it) and speaks directly to the right side of your brain (“the experimental self”), whose job it is to engineer change.

Oh, and apropos of Rule #7, this exercise is
fun!

This done, let’s look at the Internet for further clues. In my opinion, the single most useful website with regard to careers, is CNNMoney’s (
http://money.cnn.com
). This site is home to
Money
magazine,
Fortune
, and
Business 2.0
. Among its other information, it has Best Jobs, ranked by either pay or job growth or quality of life or field (sectors), which can be found at
http://tinyurl.com/yfj5hsr
. Fascinating stuff, and very helpful, as
Money
and
Fortune
always are.

This site also has a fascinating article, about Warren Farrell’s research on salaries and careers. The easiest way to find it is to go to any search engine (my favorite is Google), and type in the words “
Where Women’s Pay Trumps Men’s.
” Once you find that article you will find it is chock-full of brilliant ideas about how to make a career choice, when money is the issue. It is based on Warren’s blockbuster book (in my opinion)
Why Men Earn More.
Warren is a brilliant, meticulous, highly ethical researcher, but his book is more
news
than it is just another research tome. If I had my way, I would give this book to every female career-chooser or career-changer on the planet.

In your search for a good career, don’t believe what lists, tests, experts, or well-meaning friends try to claim is an ideal job
for you.
Just as you would when buying a suit, test it, try it on first, then make up your own mind.
Puh-leeze
.

You do this by going to talk to at least three people who are actually
doing
this career that looks so appealing, and ask them these questions:

How did you get into this field?

What do you like best about it?

What do you like least about it?

How do I get into this career, and how much of a demand is there for people who can do this work?

Is it easy to find a job in this career, or is it hard?

Who else would you recommend or suggest I go talk to, to learn more about this career?

Don’t go get a college degree in some career field because you think that will guarantee you a job! It will not.

I wish you could see my mail, filled with bitter letters from people who believed this myth, went and got a degree in a field that looked just great, thought it would be a snap to find a job, but are still unemployed two years later. Even in good times. They are bitter (often), angry (always), and disappointed in a society that they feel lied to them.

Now that they have that costly worthless degree, and still can’t find a job, they find a certain irony in the phrase, “
Our country believes in getting a job by degrees
.”

If you already made this costly mistake, you know what I mean. It is so sad.