Building a meaningful career as a psychology grad – dispelling misconceptions, and a systematic approach to exploring career options PART 2 by Win Ee

There are some approaches and tools out there to help you figure out some of challenges we faced mentioned in the last post, but I’d like to introduce them in the context of my 5-step career exploration framework that I have developed in my experience with coachees and mentees to map out how they should approach this problem of finding out what is it that they would like to do:
  1. Awareness
  2. Discovery
  3. Experimentation
  4. Evaluation
  5. Validation
Awareness. This phase is about understanding yourself, so that you can figure out what are some jobs/careers you are interested in. Self-insight is critical to building a meaningful life. What is it that you value? What do you desire? What are your strengths and weaknesses? In knowing yourself, you have a better chance at finding and doing something fulfilling. Figuring this out (it’s a process!) would go a long way in building a picture of your future, and working backwards from that end view will tell you what you need to do to achieve it.

There is a notable pitfall however – it’s hard to know yourself! Humans are notoriously bad at introspection. Thankfully today we have some tools to help us take stock of our strengths and predispositions.

There are vocational aptitude tests e.g. the Holland Codes Test that give you an understanding of how well your interests map to potential roles. There are two of such tests that I recommend to start:
  1. www.careerexplorer.com and
  2. Harrisons’ Assessments (check if your school provides this)
Career offices in school usually have card sorting tasks that help you figure out potential preferences and fits as well. The idea is that these are tools that help you understand your likes/dislikes better, and the job recommendations are starting points for you to branch out and explore from. Aside from concrete recommendations, your personality profile from the tests above will also give you an understanding of the nature of the jobs that you are likely to be interested in in general and you may brainstorm from there too.

The culmination of this step is a better (but not complete!) understanding of yourself, and an idea of some potential jobs you may be interested in. A shortlist of 5 to 8 jobs is ideal now. The next step is to find out what these jobs are like.

Discovery. In this phase, the idea is to discover what these jobs are actually like. This consists of doing research on the jobs to find out what they entail. There are several sources:
  1. Job boards
  2. Career websites
  3. Blogs
  4. Forums
  5. People
The idea is to have a realistic look into what a day in the life of a person on the job looks like. Reading descriptions of what it’s like and others’ experiences second hand will give you a better idea of what it is. Source 5 is likely the most important – asking people that have your desired job directly about the challenges they face, how they go about overcoming it, what they enjoy about their work, what they look forward to, how it fits/does not fit their personality, how they would improve things – these give you an insight into what the job is like. If you know someone directly, that’s great! You can just treat it as a natural part of a conversation when you inevitably ask about what they do. But if you don’t know anyone that does what you are looking for, don’t be afraid to reach out to someone on linkedin, introduce yourself, share about your interest to find out more and arrange to meet. People are more than happy to share about what they do in my own experience. The key point in this phase is to build an accurate schema/map of what the job is about. There is usually a large discrepancy between what people perceive a job to be, and what is the lived experience of it. The latter part is what you want to focus on.

The culmination of this step is a better understanding of the jobs you shortlisted. The idea is that you can better rank-order the jobs on your shortlist (or even trim the list to 3 to 5 items), and then figure out whether to proceed to find out more.

Experimentation. The next step is to accrue some real experience doing some aspect of those jobs to find out how you actually like it. The central idea behind this phase is to try an aspect of the job out and see if you like it. We may know how something is like and get a good picture of the lived experience, but how do we know we actually like it for ourselves? We have to try it. But trying doesn’t mean all-or nothing, internship or full-time. The idea is that we can conduct mini-experiments to figure out what it’s like, and if we like it we scale it up at a bigger level. This way we mitigate risks and opportunity costs. How do we do it? We can split up a job experience into smaller gradations like so, other than full time jobs:
  1. Personal projects
  2. Pro-bono / Voluntary Work
  3. Part-time Work
  4. Freelance Work (Fiverr, Upwork)
  5. Temporary work
  6. Contract Jobs
  7. Bootcamps
  8. Virtual Internships (Check out insidesherpa!)
  9. Apprenticeships (Check out Acadium)
  10. Internships
All these smaller slices give you better ideas of whether you like the nature of the job, but not only that – you can frame what you do into projects that you can showcase in the future. Select a small item from the above list, try it out. The smallest piece (a personal project) works as well just to start. It would be very helpful to keep a record of your experiences here: What did you enjoy? What frustrated you? What would you like to explore further? These help you gain a better understanding of the fit between you and the job.

The culmination of this phase is a sampling of experiences of what the job is like, and a much better understanding of how you fit.

Evaluation.  In this phase the central idea is to reflect and evaluate about your experience, so you can eliminate options that don’t fit you and explore further paths that seem promising. Is this something you want to try further? Is it compatible with your goals? Compare and contrast with the different jobs on your shortlist. Do you remove anything on your shortlist? What other things do you need to know? What else do you have to find out before committing fully? While this is merely an overview, it’s possible to create a matrix of rubrics comprised of components that matter to you grade the job as well.

At the end of this phase, you decide what to explore further and commit more time to.

Validation. This phase is relatively straightforward – you go down further into the paths that you deem most promising from the evaluation phase. That means more variety of projects, internships etc. The idea is to get a larger sample size of experiences to figure out whether you truly like it or not. Evaluate again and try something else if necessary.

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The framework is sequentially presented, but it’s not unidirectional – the idea is at each step you get pieces of information relevant for you to move forward, but also backwards when you realise it’s not something you want to do, or there’s gaps in information, your understanding needs to be updated or eliminating certain paths that don’t work and generating new paths. There’s an implicit feedback loop. The philosophy behind the framework above is that we have to take an empirical, experimental and iterative approach to understanding ourselves and what we want to do better, and it is through deliberative processes like this that we have a good chance of finding something meaningful that fits us well. There are so many anecdotal accounts of undergrads not knowing what they want to do, and doing nothing more to find out further and it’s mind-boggling – we can and should take a more systematic process to this. And we should definitely experiment – the implicit notion that we will magically stumble upon our best fit role in our first try without doing any groundwork to understand ourselves and prospective roles better needs to go. That’s relying on chance and luck when there a hundred thousand different roles out there, when we are able to take concrete steps to minimise that through the very set of tools we are equipped with (research design and methods! Notice that the framework above shares very close parallels to the typical research method for an experimental study…).

After gaining a better understanding of what is it that you would like to do (a concrete shortlist that you validated), the next step is to figure out how to secure a job in that space. And when you have an end-point/desired state in mind, it’s much easier to identify the gaps/preconditions and work backwards. What are some things that are common in job descriptions of that role? How can you demonstrate that you have that quality, or acquire that experience? What are some electives you can take or clubs you can join to help you in this aspect? Working backwards will help you uncover what is required. Sometimes you do have to upgrade to make up for a gap. Other times it’s really about getting the right connections and some other foot-in-the-door in (to be honest, it really does seem to be about who you know out there…). The key part here is to break the process down into smaller intermediate steps, and generate different ways that cumulatively contribute to your end goal. A quick google will usually yield specific advice on what needs to be done, so I’m only prescribing a general mindset/approach.

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In the first and current post, I sought to dispel some harmful misconceptions about how a psychology degree affects career options, and give a systematic, pragmatic approach towards career exploration. I don’t give many concrete examples of jobs in this post, as that would undermine my core message by artificially limiting you – it’s really about understanding yourself, discovering what you want to do, what are the things you need to do to get there, and applying a systematic, empirical process to do it. It’s been validated with my mentees and coachees, and I’ve received feedback that this approach was a helpful way to think about and approach it. I hope this post was helpful for you! If you have further questions and need more help, feel free to contact me.

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