Is Career Planning Really Necessary?
This is a tricky area when we talk about how much you should be planning in your career, especially in regards to students. Is it worthwhile putting in a whole lot of work early to find that you would much rather do something else?
The question is, how much can you actually know about yourself years down the line? This article explores career planning and why you’re probably going to get it wrong [if you haven't already].
The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future has been termed ‘miswanting’ by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to a range of studies finding we are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future.
In the end the best we can do is guess and hope for the best. However, this could get tricky when trying to recruit students for longterm learning professions like medicine.
Of course, the reverse may be true also: that people shy away from certain opportunities because they think it’s not them, particularly them after a few years of doing it.
Should career counselors chill out?
Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted - [PsyBlog]
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Comments
Eric S. Mueller says on August 7th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
I often tell teenagers not to sweat career planning. It’s OK to try a few different paths over the course of a lifetime. Don’t jump into something just because that’s where the money is.
When I graduated high school and joined the Navy, I chose an electronics field because everybody I knew told me “that’s where the money is”. I never gave any thought to whether or not I would like electronics. I knew a lot of people who chose that path for the same reasons and hated electronics. It worked out for me, I picked up computers, and I have a decent job and expect to complete my IT degree in the next couple of months and I genuinely enjoy the field I chose.
In reality, I have no idea how many careers actually allow entry at 18 and retirement in the 60’s after a long and fulfilling career. In my experience, most companies these days hire you for one position and there is NO career path. The only way to move up is to move out. If you are ready for more responsibility or need to earn more than a 2-4% cost of living increase each year, it’s time to put out resumes again.
The only thing I recommend to teenagers is education. Get good at learning how to learn. I actually think it’s unfair to try to pigeonhole an 18 year old into a “career path” when he or she may not even know what he or she would like to do yet.
How’s that for a carefully crafted career cynicism developed by the early 30’s?
Pinyo says on August 7th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
I think you should at least have an idea what you eventually want to accomplish. For me, I want to be a technolgy executive. As such, I try to find a way to upgrade my job every so often so that my pay and experience are closer to my goal.
Dustin Wax says on August 8th, 2007 at 12:56 am
I think this is right on — career planning is becoming more and more obsolete, especially for young folks. Half the jobs that will exist by the time a college-bound junior graduates won’t have even been heard of when s/he’s picking colleges. I look at my own life, and I went through a half-dozen majors in college until a professor asked me why I cared– any liberal arts degree was going to take me wherever I wanted to go. I didn’t figure out what I really wanted to do until I was 25 — an even now, 10 years later, I still question where I’m heded from time to time. Just like, I should add, everyone else — the average person my age works in some 7 different fields over the course of her or his working life. And here’s a great example: I’m a professional blogger, at least some of the time, a job that didn’t exist even a few years ago.
I don’t think it hurts to have a career path in mind at 16, 18, 22, or 35 — but I don’t think it hurts *not* to, either.
Peter Fitzgerald says on August 8th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Before I start, I’m in the business of helping people find paths and means to contentment in their careers, however before I started doing this for others, I had a very clear plan for myself.
While I share some of the sentiment expressed in the post, I don’t agree that it isn’t important to have a path in mind. The concept of a career plan has evolved somewhat in the mainstream beyond “this is where you should go from here” or “if you choose this career you’ll be happy” or even “that’s where the money is”. The new concept that I have been encouraging in my practice revolves around evolutionary plans.
Change being the only clear constant, it is important that a career plan involves flexibility. If you’re unable to change your plan, you’re not going to be happy.
The key, as an earlier poster indicated, is making sure you have learnt skills to help you and can learn new skills when needed. There are plenty of medical professionals not practicing medicine, plenty of computer science students working as marketing people, and plenty of philosophy students working as developers… They were just open to a variety of options.
smarthowto says on August 8th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Nice post. I really enjoy your style. BTW, I run a Careers Article Directory and if you have some articles for distribution, you are very welcome to post them.
Craig Childs says on August 8th, 2007 at 11:33 am
I think a great way to do things is to begin working in a field you enjoy and learn. You build your skill set and develop what it is you actually enjoy doing.
What I’m afraid of is kids going through school with the pressure of attaining exceptional grades so they can get into professions they end up hating.
Whether or not this is really an issue is for someone else to decide. My brother almost fell into medicine because he had the grades and decided he could do it.
What I always thought, while I was in school, was that the focus was on the end result [the career], as opposed to working on what each person could develop.
Is there a better method to push kids into the right direction? Dustin brings up a great point: what if freelance writing for the web was an option in schools?
There aren’t really any way to get into anything entrepreneurial out of school. Should that element of education be developed?