CC4A: Researching careers

Yesterday was my fourth career counseling appointment of six. However, Debbie ended the appointment after half an hour and said that our next appointment will also be 30 minutes, so I infer that I should consider the two together as session number four.

At the previous session she had given me the assignment of looking up various candidate careers in the Occupational Outlook Handbook and assessing the future climate for each. I'm not sure if the shorter session was because I did an incomplete job of this, or if it's just part of the natural iterative give-and-take of counseling, i.e. assign a task, review it when it's completed, and keep moving forward by steps. Either way, I think we're moving forward at a good pace, and her task assignments are helping me pull off the balancing act between taking forever to research EVERY plausible career and not taking long enough hence deciding by impulse.

As I collected the data for potential careers, I assembled them into this table:

	Positives	Questions/doubts
Marketing mgr (specifically, market research or Web marketing)	· Uses analytical skill in a people-focused role. · Strategic planning. · Very versatile – can apply to any geography or industry. · Web experience is somewhat transferrable, esp. SEO. · Web marketing probably lends itself well to consulting/freelancing. · Upward mobility, if that matters to me. · Highest compensation on this list.	· “Corporate” culture? Perhaps less in Web industry. · Long hours. (Not so bad if I’m interested in my work.)
Non-profit manager OOH	Obvious sense of purpose. · Strategic planning. · Moderately versatile – can apply to any geography. Experience is probably transferable to other industries. · Could aim at one of my “real” long-term goals – one day consulting for n/ps whose mission I share.	· Past experience of lots of bureaucracy in n/ps. Are managers able to “see above” the daily BS? · Have to get past negative feelings associated with pursuing this path abortively in 2005.
School counselor	Obvious sense of purpose. I enjoy helping people confront issues or plan their future. · I enjoy working this population, esp. high-school age. · Geographically versatile. · I once read somewhere that this career path can also lead to career counseling for adults. Not sure if this is true. · Academic year would be great! Could I pursue personal projects (e.g., travel; semipro poker; outreach stuff) in my off months? Or is the summer full of conferences, paperwork, etc.?	Unclear whether this involves a counseling or an education degree. I’ve been “warned” that education schools can be less intellectually rigorous than some other disciplines. Is this true? Salary less than some other options although adequate.
Teacher (e.g. high school social science or special ed)	Obvious sense of purpose. I enjoy teaching. · I enjoy working with this population. · Geographically versatile. · Academic year.	Reservations about education schools Lowest salary here.
Professor/researcher, Organizational Behavior (also possible: Soc, Econ, etc.)	Academia might suit me. Raw intellect and curiosity are more highly valued here. Great freedom to pursue my own research interests, subject to guidance. Sense of purpose: Expanding knowledge. Academic year. Sabbaticals are more common here than anywhere else.	Academia is full of bureaucracy Publish or perish. As long as I were researching something I liked, I don’t think that would be so bad. PhD is a lot of work. I need to gain self-confidence that I won’t just get bored and scuttle it two years in.
Industrial/Organizational Psychologist OOH	This is a really intriguing field, and I think I would really love studying how people work best. Sense of purpose: improving the work environment for others. Lends itself to consulting.	Necessary to catch up on a lot of undergrad psych courses, which will take a long time. Any way to shorten this time (e.g., corequisites)?

And finally, an eventual goal that I hinted at above:

Church/non-profit consultant (specializing in issues of religious and cultural change)	Is this a sudden change in tack? Not really. Reading They Like Jesus but Not the Church has reminded me of this big aspiration, but it was already underlying some of my analysis above. Some thoughts about this idea: In a way this is my ultimate goal, but I don’t know how to get there. This isn’t really a well-defined career path, so I may need to follow along with something better defined, gaining in: experience contacts resources (savings) Until I have a clearer idea how to pull this off. Could be a full-time or bivocational goal – hence any other career where I make a living but have time to play a positive role in this way, via networking, writing, etc. is fine. However, a “day job” more closely aligned to these interests is probably a good thing.
	So it might be helpful to assess the above options in terms of how close they get me there. My previous volunteer experience in outreach is closely related to this. It provides first-hand experience, and I would like to do that sort of thing again (possibly bivocationally). However, more important to me than helping a few people in my surroundings is equipping others to help people in their surroundings!

Later on, I scribbled down some more thoughts that I never shared with Debbie:

And finally, an eventual goal that I hinted at above:

Church/non-profit consultant (specializing in issues of religious and cultural change)	Is this a sudden change in tack? Not really. Reading They Like Jesus but Not the Church has reminded me of this big aspiration, but it was already underlying some of my analysis above. Some thoughts about this idea: In a way this is my ultimate goal, but I don’t know how to get there. This isn’t really a well-defined career path, so I may need to follow along with something better defined, gaining in: experience contacts resources (savings) Until I have a clearer idea how to pull this off. Could be a full-time or bivocational goal – hence any other career where I make a living but have time to play a positive role in this way, via networking, writing, etc. is fine. However, a “day job” more closely aligned to these interests is probably a good thing.
	So it might be helpful to assess the above options in terms of how close they get me there. My previous volunteer experience in outreach is closely related to this. It provides first-hand experience, and I would like to do that sort of thing again (possibly bivocationally). However, more important to me than helping a few people in my surroundings is equipping others to help people in their surroundings!

So I'm not sure if the above is really what I was supposed to be doing as I researched, but it certainly felt helpful to compile it!

For the next two weeks I have several more concrete items Debbie gave me to research. For example, how do you become a college career counselor? What sort of degree is needed for that? What's the job outlook for marketing researchers? This is all great stuff to be thinking about, but it's a little overwhelming. It feels like there's no way I can possibly fit in all the research I need to do when I keep coming home so depressed and just worn out by my day job.

Oh well, at least I'm excited about something in my life, and that's way better than being excited about nothing.