When you have a good idea of who you are and what you have to offer, the next step is to determine the possible careers that match up favorably with your interests, values, strengths, and weaknesses. Many of the interest inventories mentioned in Chapter 1 will give you a list of occupations that match your individual profile. This list is an excellent starting point.
I have conducted workshops for high school students, incoming college freshmen, and adults. I often start job-search workshops with a simple question: "How many people here think that they have a pretty good idea of what the job of a police officer is like? A judge? A forensic scientist?" Usually, many if not most of the people in the audience will raise their hands for the first two, and several will raise their hands for the last. I then follow up with those who raised their hands the first time: "How is it that you know what a police officer does?" Unfortunately, from time to time someone will share his or her experience with being fingerprinted, etc. Some people will have a police officer in the family or as a close friend. For most people, however, their understanding of the job of police officer comes from watching NYPD Blue, COPS, Law and Order, or Homicide. Along the same lines, people base their opinions on what the job of a judge is like from watching Judge Judy, or from watching the Scott Peterson trial. (As for forensic scientist, depending on how old they are, they cite Quincy, ME or Grissom from CSI.)
Having a misunderstanding about a career is even worse than having no understanding at all. If you decide to pursue a career as a forensic scientist because of scenes in your head of the glamour of Las Vegas or South Florida, or if you shy away from law enforcement because of the constant car chases, you are making a poor decision. My father was a police officer for over 35 years, and I remember him telling me that the only realistic police show that he had ever seen was Barney Miller.
Unfortunately, many people make career decisions based on the Hollywood version of careers. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of disenchanted lawyers out there who have been practicing for years and have yet to get an opportunity to stand in front of a jury box waxing eloquent about the Constitution or the rights of the oppressed. For the most part, they are cooped up in a library researching past cases, or sitting in a deposition asking questions of unethical home remodelers or accident victims. Unfortunately for them, they found out too late that they made the wrong choice. By this time, many feel that they may have too much time invested in their career to change now. Some decide to change anyway.
Accountants and career counselors don't have the same problem. You don't see too many accounting sitcoms. (When Joe Pesci or Charles Grodin played roles as accountants, you never really saw them balancing a ledger.) Career counselors whine a lot about how psychiatrists get all of the good roles! Regardless of whether you are interested in careers in law, accounting, or vocational counseling, there are legitimate sources of information on those careers.
Targeting Specific Occupations to Research
At this point, you should gather up the results of any of the assessment instruments
that you have used. Most of the instruments discussed in Chapter 1 will have
generated a list of occupations that match closely with the profile derived from
your responses. Take these lists and write each occupation on an index card. You
may find that some of the occupations have been mentioned in several different
instruments. Take note of that by writing on the index card for that occupation
the number of times it has been mentioned.
Now, look through the index cards. Which of these job titles sound attractive to you? Put those in a pile with a Post-It Note labeled "Interesting." Of the remaining cards, which job titles sound unappealing? Put them in a second pile with a Post- It Note labeled "Not Interested." It's likely that you will have several cards left, because they represent jobs in which you are neither interested nor disinterested. For these jobs, you will need more information before you can make an intelligent decision. Put these cards in the first pile. Now go back to the "Not Interested" pile. Separate these cards further into two piles. One will consist of those jobs for which you have significant firsthand information, and you know for sure that you are not interested in them. The second group should include those jobs about which you have little quality information. Put the second group into that first pile so that you can investigate them more fully.
The first pile is probably much larger than the remaining pile of cards. This is because it would be inadvisable to rule out any possible options before you have enough solid information to make an informed decision.
I know this firsthand. When I took an interest inventory in my senior year in high school, it came back with a listing of occupations. Near the top of the list was a job that caused me to distrust the entire survey. The job title was.Funeral Director. Funeral Director! I couldn't sit through an entire episode of Scooby-Doo without being freaked out! I certainly couldn't spend the rest of my life working with dead bodies all the time-injecting embalming fluid and dressing corpses. "Where do they get these survey results, anyway?" I asked myself. I shared the results with a few friends, no doubt providing them with doubts about their own results, along with a lot of laughs.
Now I look at those results with a different perspective. Although I still can't sit through an entire episode of Scooby-Doo, now it's for different reasons. Having friends who are funeral directors, I now know that they may spend little or no time actually doing any work with corpses. Many funeral homes have people on their staffs who are very good with that aspect of the business. I now also realize that much of the work of a funeral director is not too unlike the work that I do every day. Funeral directors work with people who are having a difficult time. These clients have suffered a significant loss and are looking for a person who can be an empathic listener and who can help them get through this trying time. There are many comparisons made between the stages of grief that one goes through when a loved one dies and the stages of grief that an individual goes through when they lose a job. In each case, a trained counselor can make that experience less difficult.
Now, while I have no regrets about the road my career has taken, it was foolish and immature of me to have completely disregarded the results of my interest inventory based on my misperception of what a funeral director's job was like. So spend the time now and explore all of the possible options that are available to you and which, at some level, appear to match your interests, skills, or aptitudes. Perhaps you will determine that your preconceived notion was correct, and that you would not be interested in or suited for a particular career. At the same time, it is possible that after an initial investigation, you may find that you wish to further explore a position that you thought would hold no interest. So take that pile of cards and put the job titles into your binder (or word processing document), with one job per page. Then go and gather information from sources that will help you better understand that occupation.