Why You are Terrible at Choosing Your Career

We have often been sold this idea that a career is like a ladder, but the reality is the modern career looks more like a jungle gym. According to Lori Amato, the head of Unmodel's career change team, it is estimated that the average American employee changes careers between three to seven times. The data is hazy, as there aren't clear lines to define the difference between a job pivot and a career change. But one thing is clear. Many of us don't start in the same career we ultimately end in, and we may even experience this career rebirth several times from Coaching Thousands of Job Search Clients Left to their own devices, most people are not good at choosing the right career path. And if you're new here, I'm Madeline Mann. I'm an HR leader and job search strategist who turns job seekers into job shoppers. And the majority of my clients are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. And they repeatedly come to me and say, I know I'm in the wrong career, but I don't know how to get out and I don't know where to go next. According to an edX poll, 32% of workers between ages of 25 and 44 are considering career changes, and 29% have actually already changed. I've even had clients in their 60s who make the change. One thing that is incredibly frustrating is that our education system is designed to serve this out outdated ladder model of a career path. For those who chose to go to college, they spend four years and a sizable amount of capital investing in a degree that is supposedly going to give them the foundation they need to have a successful career. If you went to college, then I'll read your palm and venture to guess. You likely chose the wrong major. It's not even necessarily a matter of choosing the wrong major, but most majors aren't specific enough, nor do they actually prepare you. I had a career in human resources, so. So if there was an HR major, that would have been the best choice for me, but my school didn't have that. Okay, so then maybe business major would be the next best, but my school didn't have that either. Next best would maybe be, I don't know, psychology. Okay, that is the major I ended up choosing, so I guess I chose right. And before you think I went to some rinky dink college out in the middle of nowhere with five majors and the economics professor who doubled as track coach. No, I went to UC San Diego, the 34th best school in the US and the 8th best public school according to US News and World Report. And it has over 30,000 undergraduates. So yeah, you think they could cobble together a business major and some relevant curriculum? According to the Washington Post and Federal Reserve bank of New York, only 27.3% of college graduates work in their field of their degree. So already most of us are wrong. From the jump from coaching hundreds of career changers. One thing that I've seen a a lot of people do wrong is they choose their career based on their hobbies and interests or even causes that they are passionate about. But then when they get into the actual job, the pay isn't cutting it, the hours are too long, or they are plagued by other deep rooted issues like administrative red tape and politics and they realize, yep, I chose incorrectly. I checked in with one of my former clients, Yana Lee, who I helped pivot her career and triple her salary within one year to understand her mentality behind pivoting.

When I was in college, I didn't really have a lot of direction coming from like a mentor or really even my parents. My parents were just more concerned about go to college and once you graduate from college, we'll be so proud of you. And so when it came to choosing my major, I ended up choosing sociology, which is something that I was really interested in without thinking, okay, what, what am I going to do with a sociology degree after I graduate? I kind of looked at it like, I'll just figure it out. So after some thinking, I decided to do a master's program and then I ended up in higher ed. I knew that I was unhappy. I wasn't, you know, I had a master's degree, I wasn't getting paid a livable salary and I knew that education wasn't the space that I wanted to stay in.

Do you feel like you're in the right career path now?

Yes, absolutely. I love being in the IT project management space.

The good news is there are lower barriers to switching careers than there ever have been before. In high growth industries, you can transition into roles that require up to date expertise without the requirement of a full degree. Such as if you want to transition from being a teacher to a digital marketer in the technology industry, you don't have to go back to school and get a marketing degree. Since marketing is a skill set that is highly evolving and constantly moving due to the state of technology and social media, someone having a marketing degree from 15 years ago has very little value. What is actually valuable is your ability to learn new skills and prove your abilities with work samples. While this does still take considerable effort, it's nowhere near the time and capital investment of a multi year degree. A lot of your strategy can be you repositioning your current skill set on your resume to be appealing to companies. So I will share a free resume workshop below that has helped hundreds of thousands of people land new jobs, as well as a class on how to go job shopping in case you're looking for a deeper job search strategy. It's also important to note that the idea of how long someone is expected to stay at a company has radically changed in the past few decades. In previous generations, a longer tenure at a company or even a whole career at one company was normal and in some cases expected. In many industries, it's actually now normal to have an employee for two, maybe three years. And when I worked in the technology industry, it was a big deal to stay at a company for several years. I was at a company where you received a custom engraved samurai sword for making it to four years. So yeah, it was seen as a big deal. With how fast the world moves these days, a career path that you had chosen previously that was viable could a decade from now become obsolete. Such as a taxi driver whose world was rocked by rideshare apps, the travel agent whose clients dried up due to travel websites, and the ever increasing number of people who get PhDs and then struggle to find work as the number of tenured professor jobs are decreasing. I've been helping people land jobs for long enough to see that there is an extreme lack of quality career guidance and support in our lives. Too often our career support comes from unproductive sources, from the DIY approach of taking online quizzes for what is the best next career move, to reading countless blog posts, to looking for help from professors and college career centers. From people who have never worked outside of academia. You are constantly looking for help in all the wrong places. I personally had a really bad experience with my college career counselor who, when she wasn't simply sending me to URLs and job boards, was giving me advice that was literally the opposite of what was the right thing to do. To see if my experience was unique, I ran a poll to my audience to ask how helpful their college or grad school career center was, and nearly 80% of people reported that it wasn't of much help. I once had coffee with a professor who devoted a lot of his time to helping his students to choose their career path and land jobs. He admitted during our meeting that the reason he wanted to meet me, a job search expert, is that he wanted me to come speak to his students. He felt a deep amount of guilt for misleading his students for so many years. He had given them lots of advice and that was helpful possibly in the context of academia or it was simply outdated. And he said that it was only after he watched my videos online did he start to realize the mistakes he had been advising his students to make for years. As we move away from college, many of us look to our friends and family for career advice. Again, this leads to so much misdirection. Take for instance my client Todd, who took advice from from a friend to mass apply to jobs.

Advice from somebody I had talked to early on I was applying for literally like trying to. My goal was like at least 10, but a lot of times it was 20 jobs a day that I was, you know, trying to fill out applications for.

Todd burned months of his life on this incredibly misguided advice, and when Todd became my client, he stopped applying to jobs altogether and landed two job offers without applying online. I will link more about this type of coaching below if you're finding yourself in a similar trap. Because you shouldn't listen to anyone about career advice unless they are a highly reputable career coach or they are in the job or field that you want. Finally, you change. Even if you chose what was the right career for you in the beginning, it's normal to wake up one day and realize your priorities have changed. You're burned out with what you've been doing and you no longer have that sparkle in your eye. Life is long and that's really normal to want to step into a new career. What's the solution? Are you doomed to ride the lazy river of your career where you float from job to job, never feeling like it's the right one? Absolutely not. What I want for you is maybe you pivot your job a few times in your career, but let's make the exact right choice or for each season of your life. This was my experience after a couple of missteps into journalism and market research. Early in my career, I was able to go through an eight step process that over the years I have distilled into an incredibly impactful process called the onepage Career Vision that I now use with my clients to help them get clarity in a matter of weeks that allowed me to realize that human resources was the ideal career for me. I then went on to land three dream jobs in a row because I was so passionate about my work and I had so much energy. After my job well done, I started a YouTube channel to teach people how to best land jobs based on insider secrets from working in hr. The channel led to so many success stories that people started asking for more premium content from me. So I came out with ebooks and digital courses and my crowning achievements my coaching program. My business became so successful that it didn't make sense any longer for me to continue working at my full time job. So I left a job I adored to become a full time CEO with employees and millions of dollars in revenue. I went from one dream job in HR to my next dream job as CEO, which is the right job for me right now. What I recommend is to be extremely intentional with choosing your next career step. Focus less on your Hobb passions and instead focus more on your strengths and what you want most in this season of your life. When I work on this with my clients, it's often one of the most challenging parts of the job search to get clear on exactly what they want next. But once they follow the one page career vision, it completely changes the trajectory of their career. What I'm really asking for you is don't assume that things will magically work themselves out on their own. Make sure you have a system of figuring out exactly what the right next thing is. Do not leave it up to chance. Life is too short. So tell me, how many times have you pivoted in your career? Let me know in the comments and be sure to like this video and subscribe to this channel. You've got this wifi high five.