Liam had no taste for networking or any other kind of self-promotion of the sort that he assumed was necessary to find a new job within his career field. He was, he knew, too much of a bookworm, an introvert, to sell himself on the job market in the way that it looked like he needed to do. Liam rued starting his job search, even though the days were ticking down to the end of his current job, with his company downsizing and layoffs announced long ago. Yet suddenly, Liam realized that it wasn’t his glad handing and politicking, of which he was so incapable, that was going to get him his next job. It was instead his bookworm-borne knowledge. Liam was sure that if he could just demonstrate to prospective employers what he knew, they’d hire him.
Knowledge
Knowledge has vast stores of value for the accomplishment of many jobs and pursuit of many careers. Some professions seem peculiarly knowledge based. Law and medicine are two obvious ones. Lawyers learn and deploy tons of law knowledge, buried in whole libraries of statutes, administrative codes, case decisions, and their interpretations. Physicians likewise learn and deploy whole libraries of anatomy, physiology, epidemiology, pathology, psychiatry, pharmacology, and other voluminous subjects within their medical field. Yet so many other fields require large knowledge bases, accumulated through education, practice, and experience, too many to even begin naming. And every field has at least a significant knowledge base because, after all, we define field expertise largely by the mastery of a specialized body of knowledge. Your success in your career depends in good part on your willingness and ability to build, retain, deploy, and update your specialized knowledge base.
Aptitude
You are indeed fit for your current job and career, or better suited for a different career, based on your capacity, aptitude, and willingness to know. Your capacity and commitment to know have both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. Some of us are ready, willing, and able to constantly uptake and integrate new information across fields. Call us generalists. Neither capacity nor commitment are limitations. Time and access are instead the only limitations. Others have the capacity or commitment only to acquire knowledge of a certain type, perhaps numbers and formulas more than text or vice versa, images and forms more than data or vice versa, or procedures and processes more than facts or vice versa. Our aptitude for certain forms of knowledge may be organic to our brain, dependent on our nurture, acquired through exposure, trained through education, or all of the above. But we all have varying capacities or commitments for acquiring different forms of knowledge. Take the seemingly least knowledgeable person you know, prick them on just the right subject, and they’ll pour out a fount of knowledge, whether on how to rig a fishing pole, identify a bird or tree, or plant and tend a garden. To choose or pursue a career, know not only what you know but also your capacity and commitment to knowing.
Knowing
We tend to think of knowledge mechanistically, in the way the two prior paragraphs imply, as if we are picking up sticks to stack in growing bytes within our craniums. But knowledge may be more a matter of an interactive process of acquainting than a mechanical process of acquiring. Reconceiving how you view knowing may help you reconceive your job and career. We may not acquire knowledge so much as knowledge acquires or grips us. Learning is a two-way street. The subject lives and speaks, too, in the instructors with whom and texts and materials with which we interact. Knowing can be a matter of allowing the subject to encounter and take possession of oneself, not so much to know the subject but instead to be known by it, to welcome it in an embrace in which it acquires you more than you acquiring it. Whatever. Just appreciate that how you conceive of knowing, and what subjects you permit to influence and enter you, may have something to do with what careers you are open to choosing and pursuing. A career is a marriage, not just a bank account. Marry the career that you want to know and that you want to know you.
Exposure
Knowledge and knowing must begin with exposure. Many of us take up the career of our parents, grandparents, or aunts and uncles because of exposure to those careers. You’ll hear a young person explain their choice of career with something like I always knew I’d do this, as if the career came from deep inside of them. But then you’ll see that their mother or father, or another influential family member or nearby adult, did pretty much the same thing. And then they’ll admit their influence. You have to see a career to know it and embrace it. As you examine your career interests, trace them back to your exposures. Did you acquire that interest from a long-time neighbor who shared a love for the neighbor’s own career field? Or from your family’s vacations when you were a kid? Or from a movie that fascinated you as a teen? Or a professor who impressed you or a course that influenced you in college? Knowing the roots of how you began to acquire your field interest and knowledge can help you sort out how deep, genuine, and inspiring your affinity for your field may be. You may discover that you, like Citizen Kane, are chasing a childhood Rosebud sled.
Education
Many of us accumulate our career-field knowledge through formal programs of education. Extended formal education is the only way to do it in many fields, like law, medicine, nursing, engineering, accounting, and other professions that require a license available only to those who graduate from an approved educational program. If you need education for a license to enter the field, then you’ve got to recognize whether you have the education or can acquire it within your situation and means. Programs of education are obviously huge feeders for careers. Choose an education, and you’ve chosen a career or range of careers. If the education you chose hasn’t yet opened the door to the career you need or want, then investigate careers adjunct to your educational field. A law degree, for instance, isn’t just for lawyers. A law degree opens doors to politics, government, public interest, public administration, business, leadership, teaching, and other fields. Consider the full range of career options associated with your education.
Obstacles
While education opens career doors, programs of education can also be huge obstacles to careers. They can be exorbitantly expensive, time consuming, and inaccessible. If you are sure you should be pursuing a certain career or field but find its traditional educational programs to be out of your reach, consider a non-traditional program. You may think that you must attend an Ivy League school to have any chance of success in your chosen field. Not so. Access programs, meaning part-time, evening, weekend, and online programs, exist in nearly every field. Even those aspiring to be medical doctors have the option of Caribbean and other international medical schools. The education in those programs can be just as practical or even far more practical than the education at seemingly elite schools. Trust me. I attended an elite law school but taught at an access law school, the graduates of which loved outcompeting and outperforming graduates of the elite schools. Don’t let your misimpression of the education you need be an obstacle to the career you desire. Your misimpression may be your obstacle, not your ability to gain the education. In retrospect, I would have been just as well off attending an access school as an elite school. Doing so might even have been better for me and those whom I trained to serve.
Supplementation
You may also have ready opportunities to supplement your education if you don’t quite have what your desired career field requires. Online and weekend master’s programs in business administration are the classic example. If you’re getting ahead in your business field but finding that your lack of a graduate degree is keeping you from leadership positions, then investigate online-program options. A year or two of online studies, and you may have the degree and education you need. The same is true if you have no undergraduate education or didn’t quite finish your undergraduate degree. Find an access program to earn or finish your degree, if your lack of a degree or gaps in knowledge are holding you back in realizing the full benefit of your career. If you have already earned college credits but are starting at a new school, negotiate with the new school to accept as many of your prior credits as they are willing to recognize. And then, finish your education to see where your degree and new or refined knowledge may lead you.
Training
Exposure and education aren’t the only ways to acquire the knowledge you need to pursue the career that has called you. Training can be a great teacher, too. Indeed, several professions like medicine, dentistry, accounting, and teaching require residencies, internships, student teaching, or other forms of supervised practice and training in order to gain full licensure or certification for practice in the field. Similarly, trades often require apprenticeships for the same on-the-job training, to learn what the field requires of them. If you have the education but not the knowledge of how it fits with your career field, you may need or benefit from training, either on the job in an apprenticeship or clerkship, or in an internship, shadowing capacity, or short-term training program. Don’t let that gap between your knowledge and how to deploy it keep you from getting a start in the career that has called you. Investigate training opportunities.
Experience
What do they say but that experience is the best of all teachers? Sometimes, to gain what you truly need to know in a career field, you just have to begin the career and let the experience of it teach you. Many fields have roles that serve that purpose. Lawyers, for instance, may take on the role of co-counsel for their client’s matter outside the lawyer’s usual practice area, working alongside a senior lawyer as lead counsel who has the abundant experience the matter needs. Assistant and associate positions, junior partnerships with senior professionals, and even business joint ventures can work the same way. The junior party has time, smarts, energy, contacts, clients, ideas, inventions, or other resources but lacks specific knowledge and experience. The junior party gains that knowledge and experience from a senior individual in the same field who, though having the knowledge and experience in abundance, lacks the time, energy, or other resources the junior party supplies. Don’t let experience be your obstacle to entering a new career field. You can’t get experience until you start. Find out how individuals get started in the career that has called you, and go make a start of it.
Journal
Title What I Know the next section of your Career Journal, after the Relationships section. In your knowledge section, first describe your education, then your training, then your experience. Then identify any gaps in your knowledge base that you need to fill to enter or advance in the career that has called you. Research how best you could fill those gaps, recording what you learn in this section. But don’t only assume you have knowledge shortcomings. Also, record and tout the knowledge you already have that you believe is necessary or valuable in the career that has called you. Confirm whether you already have the knowledge your career requires and, if not, how you can readily acquire it. Know what you know, value what you know, pursue a career aligned with what you know, or acquire what you need to know for the career that calls you.
Key Points
Careers coalesce around specialized bodies of knowledge.
You must generally know certain things to pursue a specific career.
You may have a special aptitude for certain forms of knowledge.
Let subjects call to you, welcoming the knowledge they share.
Career exposure can give you an affinity for career knowledge.
Pursue a career for which you have or can acquire the education.
Let non-traditional education remove obstacles to careers.
Complete and supplement your education to qualify for careers.
Pursue training programs or on-the-job training to qualify.
Seek experiential learning through whatever means are available.