CHAPTER 4

Twenty Steps to Your Dream Career

ou cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

—Abraham Lincoln

Getting your first career-track job out of school is tough and it is not likely to get much easier for at least the next several years. And if getting an initial job is tough, the requirements for keeping these jobs—not to speak of steadily advancing your career or changing your career path along the way—are tougher yet.

Tough, but certainly not impossible. But you need a plan. To paraphrase Lewis Carroll, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

This chapter identifies a three-stage (20-step) approach that you can take to identify the types of jobs that are best suited to you, the skills these jobs will require and how you can develop them, what to look for in your first job, and, most importantly, how to design and control the career of your dreams. And just to be safe, it offers some suggestions on how to prepare for the possibility that your dream doesn’t quite work out as you planned.

Does this sound too good to be true? Well, it will take work, not to speak of considerable self-reflection, research, and preparation. But whoever said that building a dream career and maintaining control of your life would be easy?

Ready? Let’s dig in.

Creating Your Career Plan

Why is it that some college graduates get to choose among multiple attractive job offers and others struggle to get a job at Starbucks or Wal-Mart? There are many reasons: everything from the school you attended to your major, your grades, your internships, and—as much as we all hate to admit it—who you and your parents know. Then, of course, there’s luck. But you can turn all of these criteria—including luck—to your advantage. This, however, requires planning.

You’re probably asking yourself, how can I make a plan when the world is changing so rapidly and in so many unforeseen ways that even experts often fail to anticipate fundamental changes? How can I figure out what type of work will energize me when I’ve never had a chance to experience it? Why plan for or even bother to fantasize about my dream job when my desires may change in 5 or 10 years, or even five or ten days?

The answer: It doesn’t make sense if you just fantasize. As Thomas Edison roughly said, vision without execution is hallucination. You have to objectively assess your dream to understand what you need to do to attain it.

Sure, no plan guarantees success. There is, however, one guarantee: If you follow a logical set of steps in choosing your career and then work to develop the skills you will need for it, you will have a big advantage not only in getting a good career-track job out of school but also in building the foundation for a rewarding, high-value career doing what you love. Just as importantly, the skills and habits you use in developing and executing on this plan will pay big dividends throughout your entire career, regardless of how many twists, turns, and detours that career may take.

It all comes down to creating a plan, doggedly working that plan and continually adapting it on the basis of experience and new evidence.

Three Stages to Building the Career of Your Dreams

Although every individual, job, and career is different, there are common steps you can take to maximize your chances for getting the job you want. At a high level, these steps are divided into three primary stages, each of which has a number of steps. While subsequent chapters will explain and help you go through these steps, let’s take a high-level look at each of these steps, each of which will be discussed in detail in Chapters 5 through 10.

Stage One: Identifying a Career That’s Right for You

1. Identify your passions and your interests: Which are the classes and activities you enjoy the most? In which areas are you most anxious to learn more, what new experiences would you like to have? Don’t worry about not having a single driving passion. Dig into and learn as much as you can about the areas in which you have interest. Passions, after all, often come from experience and success in a particular area. And speaking of experiences, even if you already have a passion, create a list of new things you want to experience—and set a schedule for experiencing them.

2. Identify and objectively assess your primary skills: What do you see as your greatest skills? What do objective people (teachers, managers, coaches, and so forth) see as your skills? What do tests or assessments show? In which courses and activities do you do well?

3. Apply your skills to your passions and interests: Identify many ways (not just one) of applying each of your skills to these passions and interests. Don’t worry, at least initially, whether these matches are likely to lead to jobs or careers. That will come soon enough. In the meantime, applying your skills to your passions will provide an incentive to further develop these skills, lead to new areas of interest, help develop confidence in your abilities, and will ideally lead to accomplishments that will bolster your resume.

4. Prioritize and target a few of these combinations: Identify those in which you have the greatest interest and pursue them with passion. Learn as much as you can about them, practice them, develop school projects around them, join or create clubs and interest groups, explore opportunities for part-time or summer jobs or internships. If none of these opportunities exist, create them yourself. But while you’re doing this, continue to search for new interests and ways to apply your skills to them.

5. Begin to define your brand: Once you identify your skills, interests, and passions, you can begin to define your own unique “brand”—an identity that will initially guide your education and ultimately lead to the differentiation you will need to demonstrate the unique value you can bring to employers and clients. While this brand will evolve throughout your education and your career, the sooner you begin to define it, the sooner you will be able to begin shaping your education, your activities, and your self-image around your planned career.

6. Validate career opportunities: Search the wide range of government and private sector sources to determine current and anticipated job availability in these fields, the skills and credentials you need both to get into and succeed in that field, how these jobs pay and so forth. Use this information to narrow your focus to two or three fields—ideally synergistic fields that when combined can give you a big advantage over those with just one of these skill sets. For example, engineering combined with strong oral communication skills can lead to a career in technical sales. Deep skills in computers and statistics can be combined into one of the most promising segments of the next decade—Big Data analytics.

7. Create and cultivate a network of advisors and mentors: Such people can be instrumental in helping you identify and assess education and career opportunities around your skill, interest, and passion combinations. They can include teachers, managers, guidance/career counselors, your and your friends’ parents, people you meet on career and interest-based social networks, college professors, and people you meet that work in these and related fields.

8. Search for breaking waves: It is possible to build a rewarding career in virtually any field. However, it is typically much easier to break into a field or an industry that is growing rapidly, searching for people and especially one that is young, but on the cusp of big growth. Such a field is easier to enter, and more likely to offer a range of long-term growth and advancement opportunities than a field that is mature or in decline. Once you prove your value in your first job in a high-growth area, it is also typically easier to get promoted, transfer into another department within your company, move to another company, or better yet, invent a position around your unique skills and interests, rather than being fit into a preexisting slot.

9. Plan for contingencies: Select and focus your energies on two or three synergistic career opportunities. Possessing relatively deep skills in two or more complementary fields can yield big advantages over deep skills in a single specialty. At one level, it allows you to hedge your bets by targeting jobs in a backup Safety Career, just in case you can’t get or don’t succeed in your dream job or if that job doesn’t meet your expectations. It can also give you a big advantage over candidates with demonstrated skills in only one field. Examples can include applying skills in psychology and acting to public speaking or sales, or legal skills to healthcare.

Stage Two: Developing the Skills You Will Need

10. Create a skills development plan: What skills, education, and credentials will you need to prepare for jobs in each of these fields? Which can you develop independently or via part-time jobs or online courses? Which require formal education, an apprenticeship? What internships and part-time jobs can you target to enhance your skills, demonstrate your commitment and experience, and, possibly, to line up a full-time job before you graduate?

11. Create an education plan: Virtually all high-skill jobs require education, and possibly some form of certification beyond high school. Some have formal or informal educational requirements such as a two- or four-year degree or graduate school. Others may accept less formal qualifications, such as work experience, online or independent study, or the completion of projects that demonstrate your skills. You must determine what is required for your chosen fields and which type of learning (e.g., lecture, seminar, reading, independent study, hands-on work, and so forth) is best suited to your learning style. Also, which is in your budget.

12. Take charge of your own education: Once you identify the skills you must develop and the credentials you will require, you must take responsibility for developing them. You must decide which school is best suited to your specific learning and occupational goals and which can offer the most help in lining up internships, interviews, and introductions to potential employers. You must also determine how to best mesh two or more of your skills (and ideally your interests and passions) into an educational program, as via special projects, major and minor declarations, dual majors, or graduate school. If the school doesn’t offer the combination you need, how can you create your own program? You must build relationships with key professors; identify the extracurricular and social activities and organizations you can join; and identify and line up internships, externships, or part-time jobs that will help you learn about and gain experience in fields in which you may be interested.

13. Complement a degree with a certification: When an employer hires someone with a degree, it is often at least as much for that person’s potential than for the value they can deliver today. But, as I previously discussed, employers are increasingly looking for people who can deliver value today, as well as grow into new jobs in the future. For example, if you have a degree in graphics design, you might consider attending boot camp or enrolling in an online program that grants a certificate in desktop publishing. Similarly, if you have a degree in engineering or economics, a business boot camp can give you an advantage over other candidates without business experience. But while certificates may help, real-world experience (as through a previous job or internship) is even better, especially if your accomplishments can be demonstrated by examples of your work, by references, or by awards or recognitions.

14. Learn critical life skills: Your education and initial work experience, whatever forms they may take, should help you do more than just learn the type of skills you will need to get and succeed in your first job. They should also help you develop the type of communication, teamwork, and leadership skills that you will need in any job (not to speak of in your personal life). It should form a foundation for the social and professional networks that you will need as well as the perseverance and adaptability that will be instrumental in achieving any of your long-term goals. It should give you plenty of chances to fail, so you can learn to recover and learn from your experiences. Most importantly, it should help you not only to “learn” but also to “learn how to learn” and especially to “love to learn.” After all, in an era of rapid and continual change, you will have to continually refresh your skills, develop new ones, and understand how to anticipate and prepare for the unexpected.

Stage Three: Getting and Capitalizing on Your First Job

15. Identify your target career options: Which types of jobs are best suited to your career objectives? Which industry and company is, as mentioned in Step 8, likely to experience the most growth and create the best immediate job and long-term career opportunities? What type of organization is best suited to your needs and your work style? Should you look for a large company or a small one, an established company or a start-up—or should you start your own business?

16. Selecting the right first job: Your first job should ideally be one of the most important in your entire career. Be sure that you know exactly what you should look for in this job and how to prioritize your objectives. Understand what you should learn from this job, the opportunities it will create (both within and outside the organization), the opportunities for finding and cultivating mentors and sponsors, and how the industry and the company will mesh with your self-image and your lifestyle. And oh, by the way, you also want to confirm that the salary and the benefits are at least comparable to those of similar jobs in other organizations.

17. Set and achieve your own goals: These goals should not only meet but also far surpass those that your employer has for you. Your first responsibility must be to do every job you are asked to do, and do it better than anticipated. Just as importantly, you should continually search out additional opportunities to learn and to identify ways that you can deliver additional types of value. This can entail volunteering to participate in interdepartment projects, identifying and volunteering for new tasks that will bring value to your organization, and, ideally, increasing and improving the visibility and image of your manager and your department throughout the organization.

18. Expand your network: Who in your current network can best advise you and refer you to others who may be able to help focus or advance your search? How can you extend these networks in a way that will help you zero in on the best opportunities and introduce you to other people who can help? How can you find not only the people who are looking to hire but also those who can create a position specifically for “just the right person?” And, even after you get a job, how can you keep these people involved in your career network?

19. Build relationships: This is included in, but goes far beyond building a network. This is about increasing the depth, rather than just the breadth of your relationships. While this may include forming close friendships, it is more about forming business relationships based on mutual respect and trust. Build relationships with peers, managers, and others (ideally a couple of levels up in the organization) who know and trust your work, your standards, and your character. Find people who will not only advise you and serve as references but also proactively advocate for you within the organization, bring you into their own professional networks, and, ideally, bring you along with them as their own careers advance.

20. Expand your professional presence beyond your own company: Think about memberships and active volunteering in professional and trade organizations, charitable and community groups, alumni organizations, and other groups such as world affairs or current affairs groups that draw other professionals. You will not only expand your network but also develop skills that you will need throughout your career and your life.

Applying the 20-Step Model

Dream Careers and Safety Careers may be a nice theory, but what if you don’t have a passion? What if you don’t know what your real strengths are or how they can be applied to your dream career? How do you get all the way from a vague vision of what you would like to do to a rational career plan and a job offer? That’s where the 20-Step Program fits in.

The good news is that the younger you are the easier and less expensive it is to engage in this process. It’s much better to identify and plan for options now than after you have gone through college, have a mortgage, and a family to support.

And you’re never too young to begin this process. In fact, looking back with 20:20 hindsight, I should have begun recognizing clues as to my skills, interests, and passions back in fifth grade, when I wrote my first report (on the country of Chile). If I had recognized my deep interest in and abilities to research and write back then, or even in middle, high school, or college (rather than in my mid-20s), I could have focused and developed my skills much more effectively and established a much more solid career foundation.

This is certainly not to say that I have any complaints about my career. As it turns out, I did manage to establish myself as a “high-value, differentiated brand” and build an incredibly exciting and fulfilling career by applying my skills to one of my passions. (I am pursuing other passions in subsequent careers—including the writing of this book.) But again from hindsight, I may have saved myself considerable angst if I had recognized or thought about nurturing my skills back then!

But whenever you begin the process, understand that it will take work, soul-searching, and perseverance. The sooner you accept these responsibilities and begin to seriously examine yourself and your options, the greater your chance of ensuring that you will be the master, rather than the victim of your own career.

The remainder of the book will take you through each of these 20 steps in more depth:

• Chapter 5 focuses on Steps 1 and 2, identifying your passions, interests, and skills;

• Chapter 6 broadly addresses Steps 3 through 9, examining ways of aligning career choices around this combination of passions, interests, and skills, identifying the skill gaps that you must address to position yourself to address your career objectives, and by explaining ways in which you can “future-proof” your career by building contingency planning into your career plan;

• Chapters 7 to 9 examine the broad range of options for addressing Steps 10 through 14; the different postsecondary education options for developing the skills and obtaining the credentials you will require not just to get your first job but to succeed in that job and to give you the flexibility to extend or change your career plan in the future;

• Chapter 10 focuses on the six remaining steps; how not only to get your first job out of school but also to succeed in that job while simultaneously positioning yourself for subsequent jobs and careers.

A couple of caveats before you dig into these chapters. Although I hope that identifying these points as steps will help you prioritize the tasks you must undertake to develop a plan, it is somewhat artificial. First, tasks such as assessing your passions and your interests, creating education and job search plans, and developing your brand and network can’t be relegated to discrete “steps.” They and a number of other steps must be applied throughout the entire process, all the way up to the time you eventually retire from your last career. Second, while some steps, such as identifying your passion and developing your brand, require detailed attention, others, like expanding your presence beyond your own company, barely require additional mention. Meanwhile, some requirements, such as choosing a job you will enjoy and assessing a company’s atmosphere and culture before you take a job, are important, but don’t really constitute formal steps.

I have, therefore, organized the following chapters as narratives that highlight what has to be done in each of these steps (and what has to be done as part of or in addition to these steps), but that do not precisely follow the steps. This being said, I have generally noted which parts of the narrative refer to which steps of the process.