At the time, it was devastating, although years later, Sierra could have a good laugh over it. Her senior seminar had required her to complete an online career-interests tool that had her answer what seemed like a bunch of random questions. When she was done, the tool made five recommendations of jobs in which she might be interested and that she should consider exploring. And the number one recommendation? Chimney sweep. Yes, chimney sweep, as in hiding yourself inside a chimney covered in soot. Years later, after earning a law degree, practicing as a courtroom lawyer, and then becoming an educator and academic administrator working with remedial students and their concerned parents, Sierra could laugh at how ridiculously wrong and off-putting the tool had been. Chimney sweep. She had a good idea what they could do with their recommendation tool.
Advice
When some online app or grumpy old uncle tells you to go dig ditches for a career, you know what to do with the app, uncle, and their recommendation. Go earn your second graduate degree, start your own business, set the world on fire with your products and services, do fabulously well for your family, and then have a good laugh over the bad advice you wisely ignored. Sure, listen to lots of folks about what you should do for a career or a second or third or fourth career. Especially listen to those who care about you most, those nearest and dearest to you. Then go do the thing that calls you. Ultimately, only you can tell. It’s your job, career, and life. Don’t live out someone else’s dream, vision, or expectation. I could see some things for my graduate students that they could not see for themselves and would suggest those things when they asked. But I didn’t know them nearly as well as they knew themselves, and virtually all of them went on to do things that I hadn’t largely imagined. Good for them. You should do so, too.
Choices
America offers so many jobs and careers that you really can’t accurately distinguish and count, or fairly summarize, them. That said, those who focus on these things identify six major fields, sixteen total clusters beneath those fields, and seventy-nine total pathways beneath those clusters. Again, too many to explore fairly here. Just accept the following outline of the fields and clusters, followed by some ideas for how to think about them. Your challenge in finding your first or next career isn’t as hard as picking one pathway out of seventy-nine choices. You and your circumstances have probably already narrowed the potential fields, clusters, and pathways down to an obvious one, two, or few. But even then, surveying where your fields fit in the overall careers picture may help you confirm or adjust your view.
Fields
The six major fields include (1) industrial, manufacturing, and engineering, (2) business, marketing, and management, (3) human services and resources, (4) communication and information systems, (5) health sciences, and (6) environmental and agricultural systems. One thing you notice, though, is that fields intersect and cross. You may be in one field but doing a role in another field in your first field. You may, for instance, do marketing (field 2) for a manufacturing concern (field 1), or do information systems (field 4) for health sciences (field 5). Marketing for manufacturing may use similar marketing principles as marketing for agriculture, but you’d have a lot to learn about manufacturing or agriculture if switching those fields as a marketer. The fields are not necessarily separate. Human resources in government looks a good bit different from human resources in business. Don’t feel as if you must choose one and only one field. If you love agriculture, you can do a lot of different things in that field, including communications, information systems, human resources, marketing, and management.
Clusters
The sixteen clusters beneath the six major career fields begin to sound more like careers than categories, although the clusters still combine multiple careers in each category. Three of the six fields have four clusters each beneath them, while one field has two clusters beneath it, and two fields have just one cluster each, meaning the field is the same thing as the cluster. The health sciences field is also the health sciences cluster. You could certainly have a career in healthcare like medicine, dentistry, or nursing. The environmental and agricultural systems field involves only the agriculture, food, and natural resources cluster. You could certainly have a career in agriculture, food processing, or the extraction and refinement of natural resources. The communications and information systems field offers two clusters including (1) arts, audio-visual technology, and communications and (2) information systems. The human services and resources field offers four clusters including (1) education and training, (2) law, public safety, corrections, and security, (3) government and public administration, and (4) human services. The business, marketing, and management field offers (1) finance, (2) business management, (3) marketing, and (4) hospitality and tourism. And the industrial, manufacturing, and engineering field offers (1) manufacturing, (2) architecture and construction, (3) transportation, distribution, and logistics, and (4) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
Combinations
You begin to see how many different fields in which you may end up working. But again, many of us work in combinations of fields, either in one field but using skills and principles from another field, or literally combining skills and principles from two or more fields into a single role or career. A lot of us wear two hats at work, meaning having two literal titles and roles or two substantive roles under one ambiguous title. You might, for example, be chief legal officer on the one hand but also be operations or facility manager on the other hand. A lot of us also use a mix of skills and principles from multiple fields while wearing one hat. The development director for a symphony, for example, may deploy a sensitive mix of finance, communications, marketing, hospitality, and management skills. Don’t feel as if you must or should cubbyhole your skills. The artist who can also market or manager who can also design can have great value.
Niches
While mixes of skills and combinations of roles can be highly useful to employers and bring substantial opportunities and rewards to employees, some of us just need to find our niche and stick to it. That’s okay if that’s you. If you grew up on a farm learning only how to feed cows, then good for you and the rest of us because someone needs to know how to feed the cows. If instead you grew up doodling and have exquisite drawing skills without much else, then good for you and the rest of us because exquisite drawings have great beauty and value. Or if you love number crunching but really don’t want to deal with people, then go be a great back-room analyst. Niches can be healthy and rewarding for workers once they find their niche. Workers with highly particular but narrow skills can be extraordinarily valuable for employers, when they can find them. Don’t hesitate to train for a niche career. Just be sure it’s out there and something that an employer or customers and clients will reward you to do. The challenge with niches is ensuring their market.
Specializing
The prior paragraph raises the question of specializing. As medicine, law, science, manufacturing, communications, and seemingly everything else have grown more sophisticated and complex, students in higher education and workers training for fields face increasing pressure to specialize. Physicians may rotate through specialties in their residency, but soon they choose a specialty, take that national board specialty exam, and enter pediatrics, internal medicine, orthopedics, surgery, oncology, obstetrics, or any number of other specialty fields. Lawyers, teachers, engineers, and professionals in so many other fields focus their training on specific subjects and specialties within their field, simply to gain the necessary competence, because who can anymore master everything within their field? As you educate and train for your field, let your programs inform and guide you as to when, where, and how to specialize. Don’t feel as if you must know in advance. Let your programs expose you to specialties and help show you the options and opportunities.
Generalists
Yet don’t think that you must necessarily find a specialty leading to your own niche practice. I felt that pressure in law school and responded to it by focusing my last two years of school on a certain law field in which I had a great job offer, even though I was clerking for a law firm in another field. My law school mentor, a former federal judge and U.S. solicitor general, gently urged me to keep my education broad and options open. Sure enough, within a month of my graduation the economy collapsed and everything changed, leading me to stick with the firm for which I was clerking. I’d wasted two years of challenging study in a field I never entered. Don’t specialize too early, if you must specialize at all. Generalists can find their own place, like my solicitor-general mentor. Employers need generalists just as much as specialists, depending on the employment function and role.
Boutique
Much of the thinking about career fields examines how one role within a field relates to another role, as if we’re all cogs in bigger machines, looking for the place where we’ll best fit in. While that may be pretty true for employment with large and sophisticated modern corporations, that’s not at all the case for many jobs and careers. Small businesses employ nearly half of all American workers. Small businesses do everything you can imagine and a lot more that you cannot imagine. You don’t have to think of your career as a matter of trying to fit into a massive system with its own demands and needs. You may instead marry your experience and interests with your knowledge and skills to create a boutique business or practice of your own. Boutique businesses serve smaller markets. The whole country may have only a handful of entrants in a boutique field with a tiny market, but that’s alright. If you have a peculiar interest and skill that only a few others appreciate, turning that interest and skill into a business or employment may become your career. Boutique practices can also exist within major fields like law and medicine. If you’ve reached a dead end in your traditional career, maybe it’s time to turn it into a boutique practice.
Journal
Return to the My Place section of your Career Journal to re-examine the reflections you recorded. Have you overlooked one or more career fields that you should be exploring? Analyze your knowledge, skills, experience, and aptitude to see if your greatest value may be to take your skills in one field into another field with which you are also familiar. Or could you wear two hats, combining two disparate skill sets, in your field? Also, explore whether you have specialized or should specialize for a specific niche within your broader field, or if instead you have generalized skill and experience that may prove valuable in management and administrative roles. Finally, do you have some peculiar aptitude and experience that might make for a good boutique business? Let your Career Journal reflect your insights.
Key Points
Welcome career field advice but reach your own conclusions.
Your choices of career fields may be more numerous than you think.
Your knowledge and skills may work well across fields.
Consider combining skills from multiple fields into a useful role.
Niche employment may be available for workers with singular skills.
Focusing your career in a specialty area may increase opportunities.
Generalists also find opportunities, especially in management.
Individuals with highly peculiar interests form boutique businesses.