CC3: Fresh ideas, renewed enthusiasm

Yesterday was my third one-hour phone session of six with my career counselor. I came out of that very enthusiastic and excited about writing up a post about it, but in true INFP+ADHD form I got busy with other things and am only getting to it now.

The first session was mostly me telling her my work history, and the second was largely her reading and "interpreting" the fancy reports from the MBTI, Strong, and 16PF. This third session was the first one where I felt like her role was to really provide substantial amounts of new information to help me pare down my list of prospective careers into something manageable. She also helped me assess the steps that would be necessary to pursue each one.

Per her instructions I had marked up the page from the Strong with the ten top careers, highlighting the aspects of each role that would appeal to me. I had also done some written exercises on values, work/life balance, etc. After this third session, I've pared my prospective careers down to four:

Marketing: This was a suggestion from Strong, "Marketing manager", that i had thought about but not really taken seriously. I'm really warming up to this because I'm finding that I enjoy learning and thinking about how to use Web analytics, and that's clearly a marketing question. If I go this route the obvious next step is an MBA. It's worth noting that some of my efforts on that horrible abortive effort to apply to business school back in 2005 could be useful here; for example, I already have great GMATs. Debbie stressed that I would need to be sure to get an internship, rather than just assuming that the degree itself would be sufficient to help me break in. She also suggested focusing on the international aspects of marketing in light of my cross-cultural interests and skills, which I think is great advice.

Non-profit management: After publishing the first draft of this post I realized that I left out another topic we had discussed briefly, non-profit management. I think it probably involves the same career path as the marketing, i.e. an MBA, but perhaps with a different mix of schools.

School counseling: This is an old favorite, one of the Strong's ten, and still a very viable one. We didn't talk too much about how I would get there, but I gather it would involve getting at least a masters in some sort of education or counseling program.

Special education: This was another of the Strong's ten. Honestly it excites me less than the counseling and seems to have a lot in common with it, although I'm not sure why it excites me less. I love teaching, and some past experiences with special-needs adults have been extremely positive. Debbie mentioned that in this field, there are so few males that my sex would probably work to my advantage. It's a viable option, but probably the least exciting of these four.

Organizational behavior or industrial/organization psychology: I first mentioned OB as an academic subject that fascinates me. I suppose it would involve getting a PhD in business, and then becoming a professor at a business school or perhaps some sort of consultant. I don't know a lot about OB as such, but I sit around thinking about questions like, "If Scott Adams knows enough about what's wrong with Corporate America to ridicule it in Dilbert, and if all his readers viscerally know that he's on target, then why don't corporations fix these obvious problems?" Stuff like that.

IOP was Debbie's suggestion after I mentioned OB, and the more I look into it the more it intrigues me. I found the USN&WR list of top schools with that specialization, although I could only see the top three without paying to register. Michigan State, Minnesota, Bowling Green -- hmm, a very Midwestern flavor. Is this just to improve the productivity of manufacturing workers, e.g. in the auto industry, even as their jobs go overseas, or does it also apply to knowledge fields like software development, law, whatever? Unclear, but that's one thing I'll be researching. Alas, it does appear that you need some undergrad psych courses to apply to grad programs, so I'd have to work at making up that deficiency. So it seemed natural to lump OB and IOP together.

So I came out of the conversation enthused about several ideas. My task for the two weeks until our next talk is to research some of these careers.