The Systematic Approach

Welcome to the Systematic approach!

I will show you a system you can follow to find your ideal career — one that can bring you long-term joy and satisfaction.  So, let’s begin by imagining yourself hovering over a list of ALL possible jobs. How do you find the right one?

Believe it or not, you can actually scroll through every job from A to Z on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website.  

On that list, are jobs like Aerial hurricane hunter, chicken vaccinator, and Cytogenetic technologist, jobs that I’ve never heard of.  

  • Aerial hurricane hunters
  • Artificial limb fitters
  • Ballistics experts
  • Blackjack pit bosses
  • Cancer genetic counselors
  • Chicken vaccinators
  • Climate change analysts
  • Contact lens cutters
  • Cytogenetic technologists

There are about 6,000 total on the list.  If you read 50 job descriptions a day and pull out ones that are interesting to you. It will take you four months to go through them all.  Doable…but daunting and tedious.

You might be wondering, is there a way to help narrow things down a little?  Zoom in on the promising ones? Well, of course! We want to start with YOU and come up with a good description of who you are and the things you really want. Once you have that, a list of jobs will eventually follow.  

I’m going to use myself as an example and take you through the Systematic approach.  My self-model back when I was in grad school looks something like this: I am extroverted, like computer science, enjoy intellectual stimulation, and am a doer who likes to make things happen.  

You can quickly pull together your own description by doing a brainstorm and also by asking a couple of people who know you well what you are good at and what you are like.  We can easily spend a couple of weeks on this part alone and indeed I do that when I coach people one-on-one. But in this short video, I want to give you a sense of the big picture.  For now, don’t worry about coming up with something super accurate, all you need is a starting point.

Next, I asked people what careers come to mind when they thought about those four qualities. That shone a spotlight on several options

and this list was the result of me pestering everyone I know.

Interesting list, entrepreneur and management consultant were ones I’ve thought of for myself.  What we covered just now is one way to come up with some promising careers to investigate.

Before we move on though, there is another way to go about it.  In fact, it’s a total a shortcut. And here is why it works. Imagine that you just found out you had an identical twin separated at birth, and this twin is at job that they loved.  Now, wouldn’t you be curious what it is they were doing? Now, even if you don’t have an identical twin, you can still look at what people SIMILAR to you have enjoyed doing job-wise. This is exactly what career testing does.  

While there is no guarantee you’d love all the jobs, it could give you some good clues.  Plus, it might highlight some jobs that weren’t on even your radar.

Here is my list from career testing.  

As you can see, lots of jobs in psychology.  And interestingly enough, career counselor was on it.  But I wasn’t ready for it at the time.

Here is the combined career list that my career testing and personality-model generated for me.  

After doing some online research and interviewing people who knew about these jobs, I narrowed my list down to these four.

BTW, I had crossed out HR manager right away, because the only image of HR I have Tobby in the TV show the Office and let’s just say, I did not identify with him.  But a few years later, when I was offered a recruiting manager position in the HR department, I remembered the HR results from my test, which made me more open to that possibility and eventually accepting the offer.

You can only go so far by reading and talking to people.  Past a certain point, you have to try it out to know if you really like it.  So, the next step is trying them on by conducting some experiments.

The psychologist result from testing really hit home for me.  I briefly considered dropping out of my PhD program in artificial intelligence in order to enroll in a psych program.  But that would have been a big move so I decided to launch an experiment to test out the job first.

I became a volunteer counselor at the local jail, and got training to counsel prison inmates.  I remember on the first day, when the guard left me with the inmate alone, I was pretty nervous.  But soon enough I felt as comfortable with my inmates as I did with students I TA’ed in college. From that experience, I learned that I had a hard time emotionally separating myself from the challenges my inmates faced.  So while doing counseling work as a volunteer on Sundays is rewarding, I would get burnt out if it was my full time job.

My exploration didn’t end there.

I also launched experiments TA’ing classes and overseeing undergrad research projects to test out the professor career track.  Finally, I launched a lotion-making business to try out the entrepreneurship track.

Each of these self-started experiments allowed me to learn about myself as well as various career paths.  Eventually, large spotlights became a pinpoint: an entrepreneur career counselor.

This is exactly what I did straight out of grad school.  

So, now I’ve taken you through one iteration of the process.  This is the systematic approach,

We start by constructing a model of ourselves, this model spotlight jobs to consider.  Then we do research on them and conduct experiments. We keep iterating. In each iteration, our self-knowledge becomes increasingly refined as we conduct research and experiments.  The self-knowledge then can help us filter and narrow down our job hypothesis set.

If my example seemed too neat, it was.  Like I said, it was only the first iteration.  My first startup never went anywhere. From there, I moved on to software product manager (which started in September of 2008) and got laid off less than two months later due to company re-org in response to the stock market crash.  I was 8 months pregnant. That was my first real job out of school. I was devastated. I’ve then had to build my career in a deep recession, I was also struggling with postpartum depression.

In the years following, I went through online marketing manager, recruiting manager, executive search, running my independent recruiting firm, to finally coming back full circle to career coach and career tech entrepreneur.  I experimented a lot and iterated quickly. Even though I’ve had my share of bad luck and made tons of mistakes throughout, because I had a tight process, I always knew what the next step I need to take was, even though I didn’t know exactly where it would lead me.  It gave me a sense of confidence and control amidst all the chaos and confusion. Taking things one step at a time, I was able to achieve financial independence in my 30s. I don’t have to work now but I chose to because I LOVE what I do.

If you are confused about what you want to do long-term, try out this approach I just outlined.  By breaking things down into small-scale experiments, you can learn about your options even while in school or working full time. Over time, you can add to, and subtract from, your list of possible careers until you pinpoint something truly rewarding.