How People Really Explore New Careers: What Does A Real Career Search Look Like?

The traditional model of career choice suggests a linear pattern. Get to know yourself. Learn your kills and talents. Explore careers that seem to best utilize your talents and skills. Today, both research and experience suggest that real career change doesn’t happen this way.

What’s real? Serendipity and zig-zag patterns

Contemporary researchers find that nearly every career path involves an element of serendipity. John Krumboltz of Stanford University published several articles on this topic in respected journals.

Herminia Ibarra’s research at Harvard Business School demonstrated that career change tends to follow a zig-zag pattern rather than a straight line, with two steps forward and one step back. She found limited value in extended introspection and self-analysis. See her book Working Identity.
What about testing?

Career coaches and counselors are divided on the subject of tests. Some insist that all their clients undergo a battery of tests. Others dismiss tests entirely. One career counselor says, “I can learn more about a person from astrology than from any personality tests.” One coach asks clients to define themselves as “earth, wind, fire or water.”

Before you pay for testing, I encourage you to ask what you hope to gain from the time and money you invest. Be aware of the limits on what tests can do for you. After all, if you could just take a battery of tests to forecast your future, we wouldn’t hear from so many job-frustrated people!

So why don’t tests have all the answers?

A job is much more than a series of skills. Every career or profession includes an ambience – style, working conditions, flexibility of time. Often it’s not the work itself that drives people out of the field. It’s the “other stuff.”

Take teaching, for example. You love kids and want to work with them and you don’t mind earning less than your corporate counterparts. Your workday ends at three and you get summers off. You get a decent pension and great benefits.

However, that’s not the whole story.
Your day begins as early as 6:30 AM.
You give up a lot of personal freedom. There’s no phone on your desk to make a call home — and certainly no privacy to talk. A quick trip to the bathroom? Someone has to cover the class. The students go home at three – but you have papers to grade, meetings to attend, and perhaps a rehearsal to direct. Your school district rewards test results, not creative learning.

Another example. Now let’s say you like to earn money and solve math problems. Are you ready for a CFO job? Each company has its own culture, of course, but in general the business world values image and style. You have to be comfortable moving through a hierarchy and giving the appearance of respecting authority.

Bottom line: Your aptitudes and values may drive you to teaching, but you will soon be searching for a new career if you are a night person who also values workplace autonomy.

If you have been working a long time, tests often show you are perfect for the job you hold now. After all these years, you’ve probably internalized values and attitudes of your profession — and you obviously have enough aptitude to remain employed! Clients frequently come to me after paying hundreds, even thousands of dollars for midlife, mid-career testing. “A waste,” they say ruefully.

On the other hand, your college-age children may benefit from testing, especially if they are thoroughly confused about their first career moves. College testing centers often employ high quality professionals because they train counseling students there.

Tests may not help you balance tradeoffs. Your aptitude and values may point you to a nature-loving outdoor career, but you realize there are few jobs available and those won’t pay enough to live on. You have to be creative if you’re going to make this combination work. The question, “How can I enjoy my love of nature and still earn a good living?” might best be discussed in a series of one-to-one conversations with someone who understands the career jungle.