Career Decision Making and Career Planning Are Not the Same Thing

People sometimes use the terms “career decision making” and “career planning” almost interchangeably. One reason may be that both the decisions and the plans are supposed to be based on predictions. The decision is based on foreseeing what career choice will be satisfying and will offer opportunities. The planning is based on foreseeing the best pathway for reaching the career goal. However, as Niels Bohr once remarked, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Many people who are happy and successful in a career can say truthfully that their choice makes sense only in hindsight and would have been difficult or impossible to predict or plan for.

I offer my own career as a case in point. I showed an early flair for writing and was intrigued with the idea of writing books ever since the children’s author Beman Lord spoke to my fourth-grade class. However, I was even more obsessed with collecting. I started with a rock collection and later branched out to seashells and, to a lesser extent, stamps. I learned all the minutiae of the things that I collected and devised new ways to organize and display them. My parents sometimes speculated that I had a future career as a museum curator.

With adolescence, however, my interest shifted toward collecting odd facts. I remember that after I mentioned some obscure bit of trivia, my eighth-grade wood shop teacher declared me the Official Keeper of Useless Information. In the perfect vision of hindsight, it now appears inevitable that I would find satisfaction and success in writing books that draw heavily on databases of information. What is a database, after all, if not an organized collection of facts?

But it’s important to realize that the word “database” was known to only a few hundred computer scientists and programmers in the early 1960s. In those days, most people didn’t know any databases other than the phone book and the daily stocks-and-bonds listings. Hardly anyone at that time expected that databases would become easy and inexpensive to access and use.

In my first job at Educational Testing Service, I started writing career information for a database, and within a few years I learned how to create and manipulate new databases. My managers recognized my interest and ability with these tasks and encouraged me. Although I learned some programming skills to accomplish my tasks, the programming never interested me as much as finding ways to make the databases helpful to users. Later, JIST Publishing gave me the opportunity to build books around databases of career information.

It was not inevitable that the particular subject matter I would focus on would be careers. (One database I helped design and assemble at ETS was about books for young people.) But one appeal of career information is that it touches on almost every aspect of life and therefore appeals to my broad range of interests.

The main lesson to draw from this account is a recognition of the limitations of career planning. To the extent that planning can be successful, it depends on prediction, and predictions are very unreliable. Occupational specializations that we can’t foresee will emerge in the coming years, and each one will prove to be a good choice for the right kind of person. Like generals planning to fight the previous war, most young people are planning for yesterday’s careers, not knowing what new opportunities will be available. So learn to accept the reality that career decision making and career planning are not the same thing. A lot of career decisions that get made are unplanned, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as John Krumboltz argues.

This does not mean that career strategizing is impossible. The best strategy for facing uncertainty is to be (a) prepared for many contingencies and (b) alert to emerging opportunities. With regard to careers, being prepared for a range of outcomes means getting a broad-based education that equips you with skills for communicating, problem-solving, critical thinking, calculating, and (above all) learning. Being alert to career possibilities means keeping abreast of trends in demographics, technology, popular culture, and business practices and (above all) having a network of contacts in many walks of life. I can’t think of a better way to summarize this two-pronged strategy than the words of the second century sage Simon ben Zoma: “Who is wise? The person who learns from all people.”

College Loans: The Next Bubble?

Last year, for the first time, the level of student debt ran higher than the level of credit card debt. This happened partly because credit card use has been on a downward slope ever since late 2008 and partly because the upward slope of college tuition loans shows no sign of leveling off. The two trends are, of course, related. The recession has caused consumers to use credit cards less and has also caused more people to seek higher education to compete for scarce job openings (or to take a leave of absence from the discouraging job market), taking out loans because they and their families are less able to pay their own way.

This trend worries me for several reasons. One is the big-picture worry that we’re seeing the growth of a bubble. Like the housing bubble, this one involves people taking on lots of debt to acquire a commodity that they desire because it keeps increasing in value.

The present situation differs from the housing bubble, however, in some important ways. The value of houses kept increasing because of constant demand from home buyers and then crashed when the market became glutted with houses that were foreclosed on. The value of a college degree, however, keeps increasing because of the demands of employers. Even for positions where bachelor’s-level skills are not needed, employers tend to prefer job applicants with a degree, and it seems unlikely that this behavior will change. Unlike a house, a college degree is something the banks can’t repossess and throw on the market, so it’s hard to foresee a scenario in which bachelor’s or associate degree suddenly loses its value. Yes, there are a lot of people with college degrees who are unemployed right now, but the recession has hit those without degrees much harder.

The way this bubble might pop would be if massive numbers of college loan holders defaulted on their loans, like the homeowners who walked away from their houses after the value of the houses sank below the value of the outstanding mortgage. Many tuition borrowers have technically gone into default. Last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that one-fifth of the loans that went into repayment in 1995 were in default. With college loans, however, precisely because there is no real estate that can be repossessed, lenders can continue to extract repayment from borrowers who have fallen behind in their scheduled payments. Bankruptcy does not generally free tuition borrowers from their repayment obligations. Lenders can garnish wagers; for federal loans, the government can also garnish tax refunds and even disability checks and Social Security payments. The danger is that in a future wave of college loan defaults, even these methods of extracting payments would not be sufficient to save lending institutions from a crash similar to what happened when the housing market collapsed.

Although there is reason to worry about what might happen at the macro level, I’m more concerned about what’s already happening at the micro level. Tuition borrowers who fall behind in their payments take a severe blow to their credit ratings and may be unable to borrow to buy a house or car. Even those who are able to keep up may find that the burden of loan repayments cuts into their disposable income for many years. Young people sometimes talk about the problem of when to tell a potential mate about your college loan. Second date? Third date? With rueful humor, they sometimes compare it to having a herpes infection or a family history of insanity.

From my perspective as a writer about career development, I’m particularly concerned about the effect of college debt on career choice. I fear that the burden of college debt sways too many students to elect majors that are potentially lucrative but ill-suited to them. An article on the Yahoo! site mentioned a student who graduated from Northeastern University with $200,000 in debt. She probably could have managed her college planning better (for example, starting at a community college and not taking a semester abroad), but it’s interesting to note how many people who commented on the story assailed her for majoring in sociology. For example, one person wrote, “I would pick a major with a higher ROI if I knew I was gonna rack up that much debt.” I would hate to see the day come when only students from well-off families can major in the liberal arts or social sciences.

Workers Who Make House Calls

I think I may be perceiving a new trend in business: house calls. I don’t have any statistics to back up my conjecture, but I believe that we will see an increasing number of businesses that come to your house to perform various kinds of service. Businesses that adopt this practice will have a competitive edge over the services that require you to come to their shop or office. This business arrangement may also provide unique job satisfactions for the workers making the house calls.

I became conscious of this trend a couple of weeks ago, when a van pulled up in front of my next-door neighbor’s house. A man from the van wheeled my neighbor’s lawn tractor out of her garage, upended it, and proceeded to give it the kinds of service that are needed now that the grass is starting to sprout: changing the oil, spark plug, air filter, oil filter, and fuel filter, sharpening the blades, and lubricating where needed. Last year, she arranged for a shop to pick up the lawn tractor on a trailer and service it in their shop. It took this shop a whole month to return the tractor, and that business charged more than the man who made the house call this year. I was so impressed with my neighbor’s experience that I had the man with the van come back two days ago and to service my lawn tractor.

Several other industries are finding house calls a useful business model. You may have seen Geek Squad cars in your community or may know of a similar service that comes to people’s homes to fix computer problems. You may have seen a van-based worker replacing a cracked windshield. (They can also do that at the parking lot of the business where you work.) I know of a pet groomer who parks her van in your driveway so Fido can get a wash and a trim just a few steps from the front door. Some physicians are reviving a practice that was common in my childhood, the doctor’s house call.

House calls have always been standard for service technicians who work with appliances that are not portable, such as your furnace or washing machine, but several economic factors are converging to encourage more occupations to adopt this business model. One is the increasing number of retirees (like my neighbor) and people who work at home (like me). We appreciate the convenience of not having to leave home and have considerable flexibility about the times when the house call can happen. Computer technology, perhaps combined with a geographical database, is making it easier to schedule house calls and route the van to your door with maximum efficiency. Cell phones and wireless network capability allow the business to change the service professional’s appointments in mid-day, perhaps in response to emergencies, whether this is coordinated from some central office or from inside the van itself. Smart phones allow the service professional to consult online manuals, order parts, or consult records of past service (such as your medical records) from your driveway or bedside. Miniaturization is allowing increasingly complex tools to be taken on the road. Did you know that a doctor can now do a skin biopsy in your driveway?

Admittedly, this business model may remain uncommon in many service occupations that are capable of using it. But, besides giving a competitive edge to some businesses, it can offer workers some job satisfactions they would not get in a shop- or office-based setting. It provides a constant change of scene, a form of workday variety that many people enjoy. It allows the worker to interact with clients in a more casual and emotionally warm environment. It gives the worker greater autonomy. While traveling between calls, the worker may need to deal with the annoyances of traffic jams and adverse weather conditions, but this interval may also provide a chance for the worker to decompress between appointments.

The Post-Interview Thank-You Note

The post-interview thank-you note (in scope, it should be more of a note than a letter) serves at least three purposes. First, it shows courtesy, thus adding to whatever rapport you accomplished in the interview. This is important, because a major question in the interviewer’s mind, entirely apart from your technical skills, is whether you’ll be a nice person to work with. You can reinforce this impression by handwriting the message on attractive note stationery, rather than on a sterile 8 by 11 sheet of paper. If your handwriting is truly atrocious, get someone else to pen the note; or perhaps you can figure out a way to feed the stationery into your printer and then hand-write your signature. Don’t use stationery that’s so flowery or cutesy that it’s inappropriate for a business setting.

The second purpose the note serves is to give you a chance to make comments that might reinforce the interviewer’s impression of your technical skills or that might dispel some negative information about you that came out during the interview. Every job-seeker comes out of an interview thinking, “I wish I had remembered to say x,” or “I wish I had answered that question better.” In the context of a note, you have limited space to correct these omissions or gaffes, so choose your words carefully and don’t overburden the note. The note can’t be an after-the-fact substitute for an inadequate resume or cover letter, although it may refer to what was written there.

The third purpose for the note is to indicate your interest in and enthusiasm for the job. Tone is important here. You have to project confidence in your qualifications and not come across as needy.

One other purpose this note sometimes serves is to mention any relevant information that has come out since the interview. For example, if you received another job offer or the Employee of the Month award, this is something you would want your interviewer to know.

Unless you know that the hiring decision will be made very quickly (and usually it takes longer than the interviewer says it will), you should wait a few days before sending the note, lest you appear to lack confidence in your performance at the interview.

These comments apply equally well no matter what your industry is or what level of job you were interviewed for. The only exception worth mentioning is the graphic arts industry, which would call for special attention to the visual appeal of the note.

Reducing Stress on the Job

Constant workplace stress can take a physical toll: high blood pressure, ulcers, and a weakened immune system, among other woes. One study found that health-care expenditures are nearly 50 percent greater for workers who report high levels of stress compared to workers who report low levels. Workplace stress also causes work output to suffer, which reinforces the stress. Home life also suffers. A survey by the Anxiety Disorders Association of America found that of workers who said that stress affects their work, 81 percent said it interferes with their relationship with their spouse or significant other and more than a third said it affects their relationship with their children.

What can you do about workplace stress? My main advice would be to identify what is most stressful about your present work situation and shape your career-development efforts to change that. The process of change will itself create some stresses, but your goal can be to achieve a lower level of stress.

First, set priorities: You probably can’t defuse every stressful aspect of your work--unless you quit, which creates new stresses. So focus on the most severe stressors that you have the greatest likelihood of being able to change. Avoid perfectionism, which is a self-imposed form of stress; accept the fact that you make mistakes and view them as opportunities for learning. Be realistic about the goals you set for yourself.

Speak up: Often, your boss or co-workers can make adjustments to your work situation that may reduce or eliminate stressors. The key is for you to avoid whining and make the case that reducing the stress will increase your productivity. Ask for the resources you need and show appreciation for the support you get.

Put up a fence between work and the rest of your life: Avoid letting a cell phone or e-mail chain you to the workplace. Working partly at home can remove you from some office pressures, but it can also blur the line between work and free time. Cultivate friendships with people who aren’t co-workers.

Get organized: Sticking tightly (but not obsessively) to a schedule can prevent you from procrastinating and help you limit the amount of time you let yourself think about stressors. Deal with them when they’re scheduled, and then put them out of your thoughts. If you don’t have a job description, ask your boss for one. It will help you set boundaries on what is expected of you.

Exercise regularly: Leave time in your busy schedule for a workout of some kind. You may feel that stress leaves you too tired to exercise, but most people who take up a regular schedule of exercise finds that it invigorates them. It also drains away stress-induced hormones and contributes to your long-term health.

Eat sensibly and get enough sleep: Junk food and sleep deprivation can compound stress-related health problems. For example, caffeine and high-carbohydrate foods can increase the rush in blood sugar that stress produces.

Practice relaxation: Meditation techniques—even something as simple as slow, rhythmic breathing in a quiet setting—can help you decompress. Some people get similar benefits from extended prayer or a midday nap. Many people believe that bringing a pet to work is helpful (if the employer allows it).

Build a social life: Many people find the most rewarding time of the week is the time they spend with family and friends. Try to maximize these times. Social contacts distract you from workplace pressures and can provide support when you’re feeling blue. Meet like-minded people through volunteer work, a night class, a book club, a faith community, or a sports league.

Maintain a sense of humor: Try to find the humor in your situation. You can’t be afraid of something while you’re laughing at it. If you can’t find any humor in your workplace, find it in your leisure time.

If all of these strategies fail, you may decide that your best course of action is to leave your present job and find a less stressful situation. You won’t be the only person who is doing this; one survey found that almost one in five respondents had quit a previous position because of job stress. Another estimate is that 40 percent of job turnover is caused by stress.

The clearer your understanding of what you find most stressful in your present job, the easier it will be for you to identify a new position that avoids these stressors. Try to find a way to ask about potential stressors in your interview for the new job and, if possible, speak about them to people working for your prospective employer.

Sometimes, it’s not enough simply to change employers. What’s stressing you may be something essential to the nature of your occupation. Perhaps you’ve been able to tolerate the stressor for several years but have reached the point where you’re ready to move on to a different occupation--a second career or a retirement job.

If so, you may be interested in the occupations that I include in 150 Best Low-Stress Jobs.

How STEM Career Plans Get Derailed

Careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) are an interest of mine. I have blogged about them several times, have presented about them at conferences, and have written a book about them (Quick STEM Careers Guide). Next month, JIST will publish my STEM Careers Inventory.

The United States needs a steady supply of STEM-prepared college grads to fill the many technological jobs that our economy has created and will continue to create. In fact, if we fail to meet this need, our economy is threatened.

So I was intrigued to come upon a paper (PDF) by two economists, Todd and Ralph Stinebrickner (brothers?), “Math or Science? Using Longitudinal Expectations Data to Examine the Process of Choosing a College Major.” The researchers used data from a longitudinal study at Berea College to investigate how students go through the process of choosing a college major. They focused on large groups of majors, especially the group that they call “math/science.”

The usual assumption about how students choose a major is that students have a self-concept and a concept of the careers that the major leads to. Students are likely to change their planned major if they feel that one of these has changed so that what previously seemed like a good match now appears to be a bad fit. For example, students’ self-concept may change if they discover that they are no longer interested in the major or if they find that they lack the ability to do well in it. Their concept of the career outcomes may change if they learn that an industry associated with the major is not as promising as they previously thought it was or if an internship experience in a related career reveals work tasks or worksite conditions different from what they previously expected. The researchers sought to discover which of these changes were mainly responsible for students’ abandoning their plans to major in math/science.

The survey instrument at Berea College elicited four attitudes that students held toward their planned major: their percent chance of sticking with the major, their expected GPA, their expected income (in dollars) at age 28, and their interest in the major (on a five-point Likert scale). The research report notes that one unique advantage of this survey instrument as a window on the students’ career decision making was its frequency: “Each student was surveyed approximately 12 times each year while in school, with the first survey taking place immediately before the beginning of the student’s freshman year.”

A change in the first of the survey’s scales (chance of persistence) would indicate a change of heart toward the major. An accompanying change in the second scale (expected GPA) would indicate a change in self-concept, whereas if there were a better correlation with expected earnings or with interest in the major, this would indicate a change in students’ perception of the career.

The researchers found that expectations of persistence in the major changed differently for students planning to major in math/science: Expectations tended to decline precipitously in the freshman year (even though students did not have to formally declare their major that year), whereas students planning other majors, if they scaled back their expectations, did so more gradually over several years. And the decline in expectations for the math/science major showed a stronger correlation to anticipated GPA than to anticipated earnings or current interest. In other words, students’ experiences in their freshman year caused them to revise downward their estimates of their math/science abilities, and that’s why they expected to drift away from a math/science major.

I saw examples of this behavior in my own freshman year at a school with a large proportion of math/science majors (The Johns Hopkins University). Several friends of mine abandoned plans for math/science careers after experiencing the rigorous chemistry and calculus classes that freshman math/science majors at JHU are required to take.

The researchers conclude that we need “policies at younger ages that lead students to enter college better prepared to study math or science.” I agree. It’s not enough to get students interested in STEM careers. We need to be sure that in high school (and probably starting earlier than that) young people learn the skills they will need to succeed in a STEM college major.

Unhappy, Staying, but Not Stagnating

The consulting firm Accenture drew some attention recently with a survey of 3,400 business professionals in 29 countries that found that fewer than half of the respondents were satisfied with their current jobs. Men and women showed a similar level of discontent: only 42 and 43 percent reported job satisfaction.

The respondents showed a slightly greater gender divide when they identified the reasons for their frustration: being underpaid (cited by 47 percent of women versus 44 percent of men); a lack of opportunity for growth (36 percent versus 32 percent); no opportunity for career advancement (33 percent versus 34 percent); and feeling trapped (29 percent versus 32 percent).

For me, the most interesting finding was that nearly three-quarters (70 percent of women and 69 percent of men) plan to stay with their companies. The headline that many news services used for their coverage of the survey was something like “Unhappy Workers Do Little About It, Says Survey.”

But the research actually found the workers showing quite a bit of initiative. More than half of respondents (59 percent of women and 57 percent of men), say that, this year, in an effort to enhance their careers, they will work on developing their knowledge and/or a skill set to achieve their career objectives.

It’s no surprise that so many are planning to stay with their present employer. The economy is not offering a wealth of job openings in many, perhaps most of the countries surveyed. But another factor that is easily overlooked is the size of the companies that were surveyed: medium to large. Such employers may be expected to offer a modicum of opportunities for internal job movement, even in a slow economy. I expect that a survey of people at small companies would find more workers who are looking elsewhere for green grass.

Dissatisfied workers like the ones uncovered by this survey were some of the people I had in mind when I wrote 2011 Career Plan. My boss at JIST Publishing, Sue Pines, suggested that I model it on Suze Orman’s Action Plan, and I made a point of using a tone that is much more pushy (although I prefer the more positive and classier-sounding “hortative”) than I’ve ever used in my previous writing.

The idea is to goad readers into taking action. I want readers to commit to a specific career goal, whether it is achieving greater security in their present job (“Safeguarding”), seeking a promotion (“Climbing”), moving to another employer, but in the same occupation and industry (“Decamping”), moving to another employer and industry, but in the same occupation (“Revamping”), or switching to a new employer and a new occupation (“Reinventing”). For each goal, I suggest a strategy and specific action steps for pursuing that strategy.

For example, if acquiring better skills is part of the strategy (as it should be for the many Accenture-surveyed workers who want to climb the ladder at their present company), I identify ways to build skills, with tools that readers can use, such as the text of an e-mail that requests a skill-testing work assignment.

One of the premises of 2011 Career Plan is that this is a good year to take career-building action because job opportunities in the United States are finally starting to improve. When I wrote the book, in 2010, there was still a considerable amount of fear that a double-dip recession would reverse the few employment gains that had materialized by then. Since that time, however, my optimism is starting to look warranted. This month we are seeing much more encouraging news about job growth. The unemployment rate finally fell below 9 percent in February. The drop of almost one percent over the previous three-month period was the largest our economy has seen in nearly 28 years.

There are still some worries that rising oil prices will dampen economic growth (one more reason we need to shift to a green-energy economy!), but on balance 2011 looks like the time when dissatisfied workers--or anybody concerned about job security--should be making an action plan and taking steps to put it into effect.