Dan’s practice, to which he had devoted his entire adult life, had dried up. He could no longer deny it. For a time, he had pretended that its demise was due to the economy or other temporary conditions. But before too long, he could tell that it was over and not coming back. Dan could have seen the handwriting on the wall years earlier if he had wanted to look with discernment, he now knew. But second guessing didn’t matter. Dan needed a new career doing something that people wanted and needed him to do. The question was only where and how to start looking.
Strategic
You’ve now spent some good time understanding who you are, what you know and can do, and where you are most productive and creative. You’ve now completed the first major phase of a strategic approach to your best career, which is to know your side of the career equation. But careers have two sides, not one side. The other side of the equation involves discerning the needs that you may be able to meet in a job and career. If twiddling thumbs was your talent, and a career was all about talents, then you could just go ahead with your thumb twiddling. But thankfully, careers have not just a supply side but also a demand or need side of the equation. Your career isn’t all about you. Your career is equally about others whose needs your career is meeting.
Salvational
Never regret the needs side of the career equation. Instead, deeply appreciate that to find and pursue a fruitful career you must aim your talents toward meeting a need for them. The need side of the career equation keeps the question of your best career from becoming a study in navel gazing, the excessive contemplation of oneself that turns one inward to one’s own destruction. Careers are, in that sense, salvational. They insist that you develop and match your talents to the satisfaction of a need for them. Careers draw us outward from ourselves and into the structure and story of the world.
Episodic
See, people and their practices change, and their needs for the help of others change with them. You might have entered a career that appeared to have solid prospects for you well into the future, if not for the rest of your work life. But you’ve seen above that workers average five or more careers during their work life. And that’s not entirely by choice. Needs come and go, and careers come and go with them. When you are choosing and pursuing a career, investigate its current, mid-term, and long-term prospects. When you are deep into a career, keep an eye on its horizon. You may see the sun setting on your career in time to take up a new career without a difficult transition.
Needs
You may have assumed that entrepreneurs dream up visionary products and services that they are most capable of producing and then head off to sell them. Not so much. Entrepreneurs may instead engage in deep research into customer needs and objectives, to discern the products and services that meet those needs and objectives. You can and perhaps should do the same thing with careers. Don’t pursue what you do best, hoping others appreciate and pay for it. Instead, research what others need, and then discern how you can best provide it. Or at least, meet the customer in the middle between what you are good at knowing and doing, and what the customer may pay you to know and do. And again, don’t see your need to adjust your talents to others’ need for them as an unfortunate feature of gaining a job and career. Instead, see your need to match your talents to others’ needs as your way to participate authentically in the real, rather than your imagined, world. Careers aren’t fantasies. They’re realities, sometimes the most real thing we do.
Markets
Individuals planning their careers or making career moves may want to think in terms of concrete specifics, like what first or next job is readily available. That desire to quickly grasp the first tangible opportunity is understandable. Planning or evaluating a career, and studying the need to change careers, can be a worrisome activity. What does the future hold? The thought of lifelong unemployment rears its ugly head. But to grasp for the first thing you see is to miss that labor markets and their trends are often hidden. What you first see isn’t all that’s necessarily available. Indeed, what you first see may be one of your least desirable opportunities. You may be seeing it because others know that it’s no longer what you’d really want to be doing, given its current and future prospects. Don’t think so much in terms of finding something, anything, to get your career started or get your career moved. First, think in terms of markets for your talents, meaning forums and niches in which buyers of talents meet talented sellers. Careers exist within markets for needed goods and services.
Research
You can and should do some research into markets for goods and services that align with your career interests. Even if your career is in something so traditional as law or medicine, those professions have changed rather dramatically and look to continue to change dramatically in the near and mid-term future, in the services they supply, to whom they supply them, and the manner in which they reach those persons and deliver those services. So, too, have agriculture, food services, retail, banking, higher education, design services, transportation, and a host of other traditional or long-standing career fields. The pace of change in the labor markets and markets for goods and services is rapid and increasing. Doing your research can lead you to sustainable, growing, or even burgeoning fields and away from fading, dying, and dead fields.
Discovery
In your labor market research, don’t miss the opportunity to discover potential new career fields. You’re not just looking for growing and dwindling fields, sectors and roles with which you are at least vaguely familiar. You’re not just looking for traditional fields that have a labor shortage or surplus. You’re also looking for entirely new fields, ones about which you’ve never heard and where the labor market is only beginning to take shape. Those careers may not yet have traditional entrance routes, such as through formal programs of education, traditional campus recruiting and interviewing, or professional search consultants. You may not even discover these new fields in labor market studies. You may instead have to learn of them through general media sources.
Hidden
In your labor market research, also be on the lookout for hidden labor markets. A hidden labor market is one in which employers do not post job opportunities in traditional forums. You won’t find their positions posted, for instance, in the popular online job-hunting services. They may instead recruit and hire entirely by word of mouth or similar informal means. Because these employers do not use traditional recruiting means, labor market studies tend not to pick up, analyze, and report on their postings, leaving their labor market largely hidden. You may, for instance, know that employers are hiring in your desired career field because you’ve heard of recent hirings. But your research might not reflect the robust or adequate activity in the field. If you want to pursue a career in a certain field but cannot confirm the field’s size, strength, or prospects, network among professionals in that field to learn what you can about its prospects.
Methods
Don’t be lazy about research into the labor market for your desired career field, even if you have already identified solid opportunities. Do the research anyway. Your research results may help you in choosing among job offers or negotiating employment terms with a preferred employer. Know your labor market, especially if you’re committed to entering it. View Bureau of Labor Statistics and other reliable data, readily available online. Localize that data to your region or locale through state labor statistics and state or local professional or trade association sources. Professional and trade associations may even perform and publish labor economics surveys, showing which sectors within the field are growing or declining, or offering the higher wages. But don’t restrict your research to official statistics. Check private online job-hunting services, which may publish their own data. Count the number and assess the quality of specific listings in your field and locale.
Interviews
Don’t stop at online research. An informational interview can be one of the most-fruitful research techniques about jobs and career fields. You might learn more in a half hour or hour of conversation with a senior practitioner in your field of interest than you would in many hours of online research. Try to get coffee with individuals in the field who know the strength and direction of its labor market. Your school’s alumni network and even family friends and others in your town can be solid sources of information. Let them know your purpose in asking a few minutes of their time so that they can prepare their thoughts. They may invite others into the conversation who can help you even more, including individuals who may have job positions or job leads to offer. Prepare for informational interviews as you would prepare for a job interview, with research into the person with whom you are meeting and their company and field.
Populations
When researching sustainable and emerging careers, focus on populations whose members your career may be able to serve. Jobs and careers tend to serve certain demographics, some broad, others narrow. What population do your career skills serve? Populations tend to have different needs. New, young mothers have certain needs. Elderly women and men have other needs. New business owners have certain needs, while owners and managers of mature businesses have other needs. Athletes have peculiar needs, while outdoor adventurers and hikers and campers have other needs. Working professionals with teenage children have certain needs, while workers approaching retirement have other needs. You get the picture. Indeed, try to paint as clear a picture of the prototypical individual who most represents whom your career skills would best serve. That picture will help you determine whether you truly have the affinity and skills to help that population with its needs.
Needs
When researching sustainable and emerging careers, think also of the needs that your career skills can meet. What is it that the retirees, young couples, couples with children, elderly couples, small businesses, large corporations, government agencies, or other families, individuals, or entities you hope and expect to serve really need, want, or believe that they need? What are their objectives? What are they hoping to accomplish with your services? Once you discern both the population your career would serve and the need your career would meet for that population, you’ll have a clearer idea of how suited you and your skills are to meeting that need. You can and will research specific job opportunities, at some point. But having a clearer idea of whom you intend to serve and how you expect to serve them will give you a deeper, clearer, and stronger commitment to your career. It may also help you become a better innovator and entrepreneur in serving that population, once you are in your career.
Discernment
Exercise your best discernment over market trends for goods and services offered through the careers that attract you and for which you believe you are most fit. Don’t let it be entirely a numbers thing. Let the field’s size and strength inform you. But also recognize the large number of subtle factors that can go into making the right choice of a career field. The need for your work in that field is a critical ingredient. Don’t pick a dying field just to be able to say that you were the last one to work in it. Yet a lot of factors can affect whether you should enter a field, the prospects for which don’t look particularly rosy at the moment. If after doing your research, you are still sure that you are headed down the right track into a field that’s in a bit of a recession, then proceed with caution. Your intuition may be right, at least for you if not for others. Just be as sure as you can that you’ll have others needing and wanting your services, before you dive headlong into your dream field.
Journal
Title My Markets the next section of your Career Journal, after the section on Productivity. In this next section, begin by identifying the markets for goods and services that relate to the careers in which you are interested. Then research those markets, recording your results in this section. If, for instance, you’re dead set on being a real estate agent in a specific locale, then find out the size of your real estate market, the number of agents it supports, their average age and income, the number of agencies employing them, and the number of openings those agencies may have for additional agents, even if not advertised but instead hidden. As you research potential career markets, see if you can discern and investigate one or more potential new career fields, where you would be an early entrant. Commit to doing more than online research. Interact with a few individuals who know your fields of interest, and record what you learn from them. Also record any trends you discern or about which you read or hear, if they might affect your judgment. When you’re well along in this section, begin ranking your career fields of interest in terms of best to worst prospects. Keep adjusting your rankings as you continue to work on this section.
Key Points
A career isn’t all about your talents but about meeting needs for them.
A strategic approach involves matching your talents to others’ needs.
Meeting others’ needs draws you out of yourself into the real world.
Others’ needs change, meaning that your career may change.
Careers exist within markets for goods and services meeting needs.
Researching needs for goods and services can guide career choices.
Expect to discover new career fields through your research.
Also investigate hidden markets that do not recruit traditionally.
Research can include online statistics and services and networking.
Focus on populations and their needs that you can serve.
Exercise discernment over market trends for goods and services.