How do I get started with career exploration?
Helping students and postdocs get started with career exploration is our specialty. Thoroughly exploring your career options can help you feel more confident in transitioning to your next step, and it can be a fun and motivating process! Here, we’ll outline three steps you can take to get started:
- Conduct a self-assessment
- Gather information
- Reflect
Step 1: Conduct a self-assessment
One of the most common barriers to beginning exploring careers is “I don’t even know what careers are out there – where do I start?!” Self-assessments can help address this uncertainty by providing lists of possible career paths based on your evaluation of your own skills, interests, and values. Two tools that we like for conducting self-assessments are the ScienceCareers’ myIDP and ImaginePhD. It’s important to keep in mind that the lists of careers generated by these tools aren’t predictive! A career that is highly ranked may not be a good fit for you, and conversely, a career that is ranked lower may be an excellent option. Approach using tools like myIDP and ImaginePhD with the goal of gaining awareness of possible career paths, and use the lists of possible career paths to identify a few that you’d like to learn more about.
In addition to generating lists of career options, self-assessments can help you define what you’d like your ideal career to look like. As you’re answering the questions and looking at the assessment results, consider what your priorities for your next role are.
What kind of work do you want to do? What skills do you want to be able to use or build in that role? What do you value highly, and how does that impact the careers you’re willing to consider? How do you want your career to fit in with the rest of your life?
Step 2: Gather information
Once you’ve identified a career path you’d like to learn more about (either via self-assessments or some other venue), the next step is gathering information about that path so you can assess whether this is a viable option for you. There are several sources of information available to you:
- Career panels (live or recordings online). The OPD maintains an archive of recorded career panels, which cover a wide variety of career paths. Career panels are useful for learning about a career path from current professionals, and generally provide information about many aspects of a career path: day-to-day work, scope of the role within an organization, hiring processes, etc. These are a great way to get current information (though again, be mindful of the recording date!) without having to expend a lot of energy.
- Online articles about the career path. The ScienceCareers’ myIDP tool links to articles like this for each possible career path under the “Read About Careers” tab. These sources are good for learning general information about what that job entails, and settings that one could do that type of work in. One downside of online articles is that information about careers can become dated quickly, so be mindful of the publication date.
- Informational interviews. If you’ve met with the OPD about exploring careers, we probably recommended doing informational interviews. We’re informational interview evangelists! Informational interviews are conversations with the goal of the interviewer (you) learning about the interviewee’s (a professional with a career you’re interested in) career path or current role. These are a great source of information because you know the information is current, you can tailor the questions so you’re learning about what’s most important to you (the priorities you identified in Step 1), and you get the bonus of building your network of contacts in a job sector you’re interested in. The downsides of informational interviews are that they only reflect one person’s perspective, and they can be time-intensive. If you’re interested in doing informational interviews but you don’t know where to start, check out the OPD’s seminar on Informational Interviews and Networking to learn more (UMN login required to view).
- Job Postings. Looking at job postings can provide a lot of practical information that can aid your career exploration. You can learn what companies are frequently hiring for certain position types, what types of titles are used for roles you’re interested in, whether a specific type of job is geographically restricted to a few hub regions, and key skills that you’ll need for those roles. Doing this early is best, because you have time to adjust based on what you learn. Is there a role that sounds perfect for you, but you’re missing one of the key skills you see listed in almost every job ad? Look for ways to build that skill or gain that experience during the remainder of your graduate training! Perhaps you thought you were interested in a certain career path, but your search of job postings indicated that these jobs are mostly restricted to a geographical region that you don’t want to live in. Maybe this option isn’t as viable as you thought. Learning this information early is good, because you now know you’ll need to explore other options more thoroughly.
Gather as much information as you can, preferably from multiple sources. The more data you have, the stronger your conclusions will be! (True in science, true in career exploration.) We recommend keeping track of what you've learned from each source in a notes document, spreadsheet, or other organization tool so you can reference this information later.
Step 3: Reflect
As you gather information about careers, it’s important to reflect on what you’re learning. Often, career exploration is an iterative process that requires learning about multiple career paths to be confident about moving forward with one or two paths that best suit you. By reflecting on what you’re learning, you can get a better sense of your priorities and you’ll likely become more efficient at exploring careers. The University of California San Francisco Office of Career & Professional Development has developed this Career Exploration Roadmap that shows the entire career exploration process, including some reflection questions that can help you in processing what you’ve learned. Generally, try to have specific answers to these questions: Why do you like the career path(s) that you like? Why don’t you like the career path(s) that you don’t like? How can you maximize the elements you enjoy, and minimize the elements that you don’t?
Summary
We encourage you to integrate career exploration into your graduate training! Doing so early can allow you to maximize your time in graduate school, and tailor your training towards the career path(s) you’re interested in pursuing. The OPD can support you throughout the process of exploring careers and implementing a plan to transition to a career of your choice: reach out to us at [email protected] to schedule a 1-on-1 appointment.