on making informed career decisions

among people of a certain age range / life stage, the question about what to do about career decisions is frequent. and heavy. as the world of work changes, our systems of figuring out how to move forward aren’t catching up. similarly, the advice the worked for our parents and their parents doesn’t really work anymore (if it ever did).

but even given all that, there is no reason make uninformed decisions about things as important as work (and by work i mean what we do to provide the resources for ourselves to live the lives we want).

from a number of different sources (the defining decade, gibrán rivera, show your work, etc.), i’ve put together the following list of ways one can make informed career decisions.

the top level message here is to gather data (in the whole-bodied sense of that word). how?

as you take on these data gathering expeditions, keep track of what you learn. journal if you can, but at the very least take notes.

as you do this for one career path, you’ll get more efficient over time. sometimes that looks like a speed-up, but not always. for example, you’ll learn which data gathering pathway works best for you or gives you the best/most information. then you can focus on that/those one(s) for the next ones. you’ll also probably find sources of information that you can circle back to though this doesn’t apply equally across all data types. gathering experiential and also play/performative data is just time consuming by nature.

ok. two final notes:

having data won’t allow you to make the perfect decision.

why? three reasons:

in today’s era, you aren’t really stuck to one path

for lots of reasons (mostly related to economic shifts), people aren’t locked into the same path forever. well, maybe we never were, but least at ceratin points in history it made more sense to be (either because of how society was structured or because the benefits of doing so were just so good). anyway, these days we have more options. you can:

so yea. i’m interested in supporting people to do more learning about what they want to do for “work.” if that interests you too, get in touch!

words / writing / post-processing
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