You Majored in What? (2 page)

Oops.

Is something wrong here? No, something’s actually right. Clearly, reality doesn’t always match up to that traditional linear career path. These graduates, whether by design or by accident, have channeled the real, deep value of their academic and life experiences, and taken them beyond traditional thinking.

The linear career path hasn’t disappeared. Some psychology majors do become psychologists and some English majors become English professors. But linear thinking can keep you from thinking broadly about your options and being open-minded to new opportunities.

LINEAR THINKING ABOUT CAREERS

Right about now you’re probably thinking that pursuing an education that directly relates to a career, and vice versa, seems so stable and easy. Wouldn’t it make more sense to follow a more direct path? After all, if you try to use that second chart as a guide, you really have no idea where you might end up. And doesn’t most of the advice out there on career planning focus on that direct path?

As we saw earlier, the roots of modern-day career counseling lie in the early twentieth century, 1909 to be exact, when Frank Parsons, an engineering professor, developed his trait-and-factor approach to making career decisions. Parsons defined a
trait
as a characteristic of a person that could be discovered by testing, and a
factor
as a characteristic of a job. He described his approach as “matching men to jobs” and believed there was one right career for each worker.

This approach to career analysis was designed to reduce any elements of chance or uncertainty in the process, just like those books and Web sites that neatly outline the “five steps to your career” and ask you to quickly set a goal and move toward it. Career assessments are integral to this method to further eliminate the element of chance, on the assumption that a test will help you determine the exact fit between your traits and the workplace factors.

Now, any theory that has hung around for a hundred years can’t be all bad, and it
is
important to know how your strengths and skills fit into the workplace (and you’ll explore these in the next few chapters), but many career systems and assessment instruments follow the trait-and-factor approach too literally, leading you down the linear path using traditional linear thinking and reasoning. They are too simplistic for twenty-first-century career planning.

For instance, if you use traditional deductive reasoning, where you start with one personal trait and expand it to a career factor, you might follow this logical train of thought:

• Pilots must have strong attention to detail.

• I have strong attention to detail.

• I should be a pilot.

Or

• The Peace Corps helps people.

• I want to help people.

• I should work for the Peace Corps.

One particular challenge with deductive reasoning is that it assumes the first statement is true. If the first statement is inaccurate, then the reasoning quickly falls apart. On the other hand, if you rely on traditional inductive reasoning, where you start with a large factor like a field of employment and reduce it to a simple trait, you might follow this train of thought:

• Every lawyer I’ve met has been untrustworthy.

• Therefore all lawyers are untrustworthy.

• I can’t be a lawyer.

Or

• My insurance salesperson is boring.

• Therefore the insurance industry is boring.

• I won’t look at careers at an insurance company.

While these traditional reasoning methods are simple and (on the surface) logical, they could actually impede your career planning. You might choose a career field or employer based on one arbitrary skill or characteristic (trait) you possess, which might ultimately not work for you, or conversely, you might completely avoid a career field because you have developed a global perception of it (factor) based on your limited personal experience.

For instance, if you speak with Peace Corps recruiters, they will tell you that the Peace Corps volunteer position is extremely tough, demanding, and often frustrating. They don’t want people who just want to “help.” They need practical people with their heads on their shoulders who see the big picture of providing service but aren’t there to save the world.

And did you know that the insurance industry offers fascinating positions for people with all sorts of interests? In the field of underwriting, for example, special knowledge or expertise is often called for to make important judgments about the value of property. An art history major, for example, works with a major insurance firm valuing the oriental carpets and art holdings of major corporations. A geology major evaluates beach properties for an insurance company, determining the odds of hurricanes or other natural phenomena destroying them. She spends much of her time traveling to beachfront communities, sometimes to review new developments and other times to assess damage after a hurricane or other tragic event. Is that a “boring” job?

Wandering off:

MY DEGREE EQUALS MY EARNING POWER

Want to know the number one most requested piece of information from college career centers? The employment figures from alumni surveys. Everyone, from students to parents to government agencies, wants to know what percentage of students found jobs by graduation. And how much were they earning. And their major. There seems to be a theory that if sociology majors found jobs in X field, making X dollars, then I, a sociology major, can find a job in X field making X dollars. While there’s some truth to that theory, there’s less truth than you might imagine.

Study after study show poor correlations between students’ undergraduate majors and their income. Get that?
Weak
correlation. You’re working off a common myth that your degree equals your earning power.

Your earning power is much more affected by where you live, your field of work, and your job title. An accounting major working for a small nonprofit organization in the Midwest will likely earn less than an English major working as an investment banker in New York City. Get the point?

Is it true that engineers generally make higher salaries than liberal arts majors? Yes. But—hello—they’re
engineers. Do you want to be an engineer? Then go to engineering school and be one. Problem solved.

So take a minute to think about what you’ve said and heard about career planning. You can catch yourself (or your parents) thinking linearly about careers if you’re harboring any of these thoughts:

• “My major equals my career.”

• “If I can just combine the right skills and the right values, I’ll know what I want to do.”

• “I can’t do much with a liberal arts degree.”

• “I guess I should go to grad school.”

• “I guess I should go to law school.”

• “Career tests will tell me what to do”

• “Career counselors can tell me what to do”

• “I should wait until I know what I want to do before starting my job search.”

• “I should wait until I graduate to start my job search.”

So if this linear approach doesn’t really work all that well in the twenty-first century, what model do you turn to if you’re multitalented, multifaceted, or just not sure?

HOW COLLEGE STUDENTS REALLY FIND JOBS

It’s ridiculous to ask liberal arts students what they plan to do in five years. They don’t even know what they plan to have for dinner.

—ANONYMOUS COLLEGE CAREER COUNSELOR

As we’ve noted, if you listen to most people and read most career books or Web sites, you might assume that the job search is a linear logical process: you set a specific career goal, follow clearly outlined steps, and arrive at the perfect job. But try asking graduates how they actually arrived at their current jobs. You’ll get replies like this one:

I don’t know exactly. I majored in psychology and thought I’d pursue a Ph.D. and maybe become a professor. But I also liked my anthropology classes, and a professor told me about a summer internship in a museum. I helped create an exhibit on Native American art and I really enjoyed the work. Then an alumna spoke at a career program on her work at the Smithsonian Institution. It sounded interesting so I went up and introduced myself to her. We kept in touch and she called me during my senior year to see if I would be interested in a fund-raising position for the Smithsonian’s new Native American exhibit. So here I am using my psychology skills to ask important business and community leaders to fund our research and exhibits. And I love it. And now that I know how museums work and how to raise money, my goal is to open an art gallery/museum on a Native American reservation.

Notice how this story starts out in a linear way: the student was studying psychology so she could become a psychology professor. But then a totally unpredictable event occurred: her internship at a museum caused her to start thinking about other choices. And then a chance meeting with an alumna resulted in a job opportunity. If you had asked her at age eighteen, “What are you going to do with that psychology major?” do you think she would have said, “I’m going to open an art gallery/museum in New Mexico”?

Clearly the linear approach isn’t at work here. Unplanned events and emerging conditions changed this individual’s circumstances. We need a theory that fits this more typical situation, a theory that recognizes that just like the life of the psychology major above, yours isn’t unfolding in a straight line either, and the job search seems chaotic and messy at best. Enter chaos theory—a nonlinear and much more relevant career theory for you. Now, that sounds daunting and complicated, not to mention, well, chaotic. But it’s really rather simple. And believe it or not, once you learn the key elements of chaos theory, which form the basis of the Wise Wanderings system you will learn in this book, you’ll find you can relax and go with the flow of your job search instead of wanting to force and control everything.

In fact, you have just witnessed a key element of chaos theory: the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect states that a small incident at the beginning of a process (such as a butterfly flapping its wings or a graduate speaking at a career event) can produce a large variation in the long-term outcome (ultimately causing a tornado or a new career). A chaos-based career system allows for change and the unexpected. It takes into account your diverse interests and broad scope of knowledge, and takes advantage of how the job search really works today. You might be surprised to learn that in one study of university graduates almost 70 percent reported that their careers were significantly influenced by unplanned events—in other words, the butterfly effect (Krumboltz and Levin, 2004).

What if you could actually harness the power of the butterfly? You can. Let’s start by learning more about chaos theory.

English Literature at Work:

CHARLES DICKENS EXPLAINS THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

In Charles Dickens‘s book
Great Expectations,
the lead character Pip makes the following observation:

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

Sounds a lot like the butterfly effect doesn‘t it? With a twist though: instead of thinking about an event that happened, Dickens is asking you to think about something that didn‘t happen. How would your life be different if a particular event had not occurred?

CHAOS THEORY

People usually smile when you tell them that careers follow chaos theory rather than linear theory. Chaos theory conjures up thoughts of craziness and being out of control: the notion that there is no rhyme or reason to one’s career path. The irony is that despite its name, chaos theory is anything but chaotic. It’s just complex—as you and you career can be. The order is there, but it’s just not immediately visible on the surface.

Chaos theory is based on mathematical formulas originally designed to develop a better weather prediction model. Think about it: how successful are we at predicting the weather? Sometimes we’re pretty good. When the conditions are foreseen, when nothing changes, and when we know certain physical laws are being followed, we can predict the weather. If we see a front moving across the map, we know a storm is coming. But what happens when something interrupts the pattern? What if the front coming from the west suddenly encounters another storm coming up the East Coast? When and where will they meet? How well can we predict a tornado’s path? Not too well generally. We know it’s coming (sometimes) but we can’t tell where it’s going. Chaos theory helps us understand that too many variables in a complex system make it hard to predict the outcome.

We also know from chaos theory that the greater the distance between now and the future, the weaker our prediction will be. For instance, we’re pretty good at predicting the weather today. Maybe even tomorrow or within the next week. But after that our predictions get shaky. We may notice trends, or make logical inferences such as if it’s August, it will be hot (at least in most of the United States), but chaos theory helps us understand we can’t predict the future in greater detail.