Module 4 - Exploring Careers and Jobs
Module 4 focuses on exploring career options. First, you’ll evaluate what you love to do and what you’re good at, then you’ll explore how to leverage it to make a living. By the end of Module 4, you will start to have a vision of the future Professional YOU.
Included in the Professional YOU is a series of Designing YOU Career Guides written to support your work down this path. These deal with some of the crucial questions facing anyone exploring their Professional YOU.
Each guide includes a series of career mission maps that provides examples of how you can chart a course to achieving your professional mission. If you'd like to start by exploring our range of career mission maps, click HERE to search our Designing YOU Mission Map Gallery. Click on each section below to jump down the page. Click on each section below to jump down the page.
What will be covered:
Complete the downloadable activity sheets available and use these as your journal throughout the Designing You modules. You can choose to download all activity sheets with the button below or choose to download them individually under each section.
What Can You Make A Living Doing?
Now that you have a handle on the Potential YOU, it’s time to figure out whether there’s an opportunity to make a living in any of the areas where you show potential. This is where we find the Professional YOU. We’ve intentionally chosen the phrase “make a living” because of its ambiguity. What you need to make a living is different from what someone else needs to make a living. We’ll get further into that in the next step when we tackle your personal definition of success. Regardless, whether you can make a living or not is based on whether there are (or will be) opportunities.
In this model, you will explore four key questions:
What is a job?
This may seem like a silly question, but it’s harder than you may think. For all jobs, you need to consider three key questions.
What functional job do I want to do?
The functional job is the actual job you want to do day in, day out. For example, there is no such thing as a “marketing job” or a “engineering job” or a “human resources job”. In fact, for almost every broad area you may have identified in the Potential YOU, there are hundreds of different jobs.
What industry do I want to work in?
Industry characteristics have a huge influence over the day-to-day for most jobs. For example, the job of a marketing manager for a public library may be like night and day compared to a marketing manager for a company that sells drilling equipment to mining companies. Similarly, within the same industry, there are diverse functional jobs all in marketing. Working in an external marketing agency for that public library is going to be a different experience compared to working within the library’s internal marketing unit.
If you’re like most people and you’re uncertain, then be sure to include opportunities in your mission map to get diverse industry experiences. Find those opportunities through things like internships, summer jobs, and volunteer work. You may even find out that an industry you assumed was boring actually lights your fire. At the very least, you’ll be able to put your assumptions to the test.
What’s the type or size of organization do I want to be part of?
Like industry context, an organization’s size and scope affects the daily job of a marketer. For example, a sales manager for a small start-up technology company with $1 million in revenue is likely responsible for creation, communication, and delivery. In contrast, a sales manager for a company with 50,000 employees, operating in 100 countries and generating $3 billion in annual revenue may be responsible for selling a single product in a single region (maybe even to a single client).
To help you answer these questions we have developed a series of Designing YOU Career Guides. These career guides are available HERE and a searchable database or career mission maps.
REFLECTION 4.1
Exploring Career or Job Pathways
You’ll need to tap into that intentional curiosity we talked about earlier. Great research starts with asking great questions. The three questions above, can be broken down into an infinite number of smaller questions for you to explore. Below are some thought-starter questions to help you start exploring.
What are the different types of careers in this field?
How is this field changing? What’s driving this change?
What parts of this field are growing the fastest?
What type of education do I need to be successful in different jobs in this field?
What are the most important competencies for different jobs in this field?
What’s the starting salary for the job I want in this field?
Do people stay in this field their entire careers?
What are the common entry-level positions in this field?
How does the locale impact careers in this field?
What international opportunities may exist in this field
Answering these (and many other) big questions can’t be rushed, so go slow and expect this part to take weeks or months to complete. Don’t forget that predicting the future is hard and few of us get it right, so when doing your research, use the principle of triangulation:
Explore the Principle of Triangulation in Activity 4.1 by clicking the link below. Activities 4.2 - 4.5 are also included in Activity 4.1 - Principle of Triangulation.
