Choosing an Industry not a Job Title
Choosing industries instead of job titles promotes success and job satisfaction.
I am going to college to be a…….
If you were to survey seniors at any high school, you would probably be able to lump careers into pretty basic categories such as doctor, physical therapist, nurse, teacher, engineer, psychologist, lawyer, accountant, mechanic, etc. Why? Because it is a liner career path. These jobs are licensed, standardized, and most of the time you major, take classes, and read books in the same subject as the job title you may become.
Digging Deeper
I am pretty firm on nitpicking teen career choices in a supportive and inquisitive way. Why? Because a lot of times teens have the industry right but the job title wrong and that can equal wasted time and money. I will give you two examples around jobs that typically help people.
Discussion
If a teen says I want to be a doctor, nurse, physical therapist, teacher, psychologist, etc. Ask these questions.
Who do you want to help?
Age
Demographics
Problem
Where do you want to help them?
Their home
In a private office
At a non profit or community organization
In an institution (hospital, school, prison, etc.)
How do you want to help them?
Direct Service (talking, hands on work, teaching, demonstrating, etc.)
Indirect Service (planning programming, supervising staff who help directly, raising money, advocacy, policies, research, etc.)
How often do you want to see them?
All Day
Once a Day
Once a Week
Once a Month
A few times a Year
Once
NeverÂ
Why this is important?
A lot of times teens don’t have the ability to express why they want to be a certain career or job and many have not asked themselves these simple questions.
Job: Doctor changes to Industry of Health
For example if a student who wants to be a doctor but then suddenly realizes through these questions they want to work in a lab not a hospital because they don’t want to see and talk to people daily, and they don’t want to do direct service but prefer research about cancer- maybe doing a pre-med major is not the best path per se.
Yes they can become doctors and then go into research, but they can literally major in cancer biology as an undergrad and do a masters in clinical research if they wanted instead of going to med school, saving time and money and maybe getting to do what they really want to do sooner than later and with more training.
The job title has changed, the industry of Health has not. I don’t even really encourage them to talk about what they want to do for a job title at 18, but instead say I am going into health and then it leaves things open and they can use all their skills for jobs we don’t even know will exist in 5 or 10 years. It is more important for them to focus on classes and what they are liking and not liking and keeping a running list of those things vs figuring out the actual job title of where they are headed.
Job: Teacher changes to Industry of Children
I can’t tell you how many people major in education to become teachers because well, they like kids so that is just what you do but do they love the idea of teaching in a public school setting? Often times, that is what the major is gearing you to do. You learn your states curriculum and teaching method and best practices and prepare to teach in that setting. Yes there are exceptions and more and more colleges are adding other types of programming in their eduction programs where you can learn various teaching styles to prepare you to teach outside of the public school system but in general, an education major produces K-12 public school teachers.
When I have education majors start to go through these questions, they start to quickly realize they don’t love education just kids. And what they love most sometimes is the unstructured, silliness, and playfulness of kids. They love talking to them and just hanging out and diving deep into their interests. I can tell them sooo many jobs with kids: social work, child life therapy, child psychology, occupational therapy, camp counseling, children’s librarian, puppeteer, children’s museum director, toy product research, etc. They have to figure out how they want to help or interact with kids. Again, they don’t have to know what they are going to be per se, but they need to find classes with tools they want to replicate on a job to work with the people they are focused on which is kids.
Options for Success
Because we can only become what we know exists it’s sooooo important to spend less time focusing on what and instead where and the details can fall into place based on their classes, experiences, and joy of learning. While it may seem scary to head off to college with a loose plan….it sure beats setting a goal, failing, and fumbling. Ask hard questions and be open to the unexpected. Questioning is not a lack of confidence it shows care and concern to help teens end up closer to where they want to be that they don’t know about yet.
