CHAPTER 6

Crafting Your Career Goals and Your Professional Brand

Steps 3 Through 10

Don’t compete, Find what’s uniquely yours

—Arsenio Hall (when asked how he planned to compete in the crowded late-night television market)

Find out who you are and do it on … purpose.

—Dolly Parton

Now that you’ve identified what you love doing, what you like doing, and what you’re good at doing, you’re on the path to making an informed decision as to the type of career that you will both enjoy and, hopefully, in which you have the capabilities to thrive.

But before getting into the next step, any responsible planning process must also account for the fact that you can’t fully predict the future. You must absolutely develop a plan based on your reasoned, best estimates of what will happen. And solid preparation for that planned future will often increase the odds of it occurring. But regardless of how well you plan or how thoroughly you prepare, remember the age-old adage, “Shit Happens.” You may, for example, be unable to find a good job in the field for which you prepared. And even if you get the job, you may realize that you don’t enjoy it, or that you are not as good at it as you thought you would be.

Or, your job may be redefined (as by technology or reorganization), eliminated (as by offshoring), or even obsoleted (as by automation). Or advancement in that career may involve taking on tasks and responsibilities that you don’t enjoy. For example, if you are a research scientist who is promoted into management, you may find yourself doing less of the hands-on research that likely led you to pursue that career in the first place and spending more time managing other people, calculating budgets, playing politics, and doing other things you don’t enjoy. Or your passions and interests may change. Or a new, totally unanticipated opportunity in another field—an opportunity that is too good to pass up—may fall into your lap.

In other words, anything can happen. You must, therefore, build your plan around another old maxim: “Be Prepared.” No matter how certain you are (or believe you are) that you have discovered your calling, develop the type of skills that will prepare you for a range of potential careers and be adaptable enough to change.

And, since I’m peppering you with trite (but still valuable) aphorisms, here’s one more: “Keep your options open.” True, some people contend that this is absolutely the wrong advice: That once you make an informed decision that you should commit totally to that decision and not look back.1 Perhaps this is true if the outcome is totally in your own control. But not everything in today’s job market is in your control. Even if you’re the next LeBron James, what if you blow out your knee before reaching the pros? You still need to protect yourself by keeping your options open and having one or possibly two safety careers (which are discussed in Step 9 in this chapter), in addition to your dream career.

Translating Your Passions into Career Options (Steps 3 and 4)

The idea of planning a career around your passion may sound pretty straightforward. If you love chemistry, plan to become a chemist; if you like writing, become a journalist or novelist; fixing cars, a mechanic; building things, a carpenter; healing people, a doctor or a nurse; helping people learn to think, a teacher. Or perhaps you know someone with a job that sounds like it may be fun, interesting, and rewarding—like practicing medicine. You may see somebody as a role model and aspire to their career. Or maybe all you really want to do is to sing, play a violin or become a professional tennis player, or golfer.

Hopefully, you already have an intense desire for a field that comes from your heart and your passion, rather than something another person tells you should become. It is, after all, your life. You may as well follow your own dream.

But even if a career sounds like the perfect, or even the only logical fit for your passion and skills, don’t jump to conclusions. After all, how many people, at any age, much less someone who has not even landed their first full-time job, understand all their options? For example, suppose you absolutely, positively want to become a chemist. That’s a good start, but Chemistry is a big field, The American Chemical Society, for example, lists 37 different career options:

• In which of these multiple branches of chemistry do you have the greatest interest? Bio, nuclear, food, forensic, or polymer?

• What type of job? A chemical technician, a research chemist, or a chemical engineer?

• What are the day-to-day job responsibilities of each?

• What are the educational requirements for each? Will an associate or bachelor degree suffice, or will you need a PhD?

• In what type of organization would you ideally like to work—a university, a government laboratory, a corporation?

• Which positions, fields, and organizations provide the best employment prospects?

• What type of salary do they offer?

It is certainly possible that you will know exactly what you want to do by the time you are in high school—say an astrochemical engineer based in an Antarctic observatory that studies the composition of stars.

For the most part, however, it’s best to begin your career planning with a very broad idea. First, your career ideas will almost certainly change, probably many times, before you have to make a firm decision. You can, for example, have a goal of becoming a writer, without deciding if you want to write newspaper articles, technical manuals, academic research papers, or novels. Whatever your initial thoughts, however, you should begin to learn as much as you can about your proposed field, take courses and join organizations or clubs that will allow you to gain hands-on experience, and begin talking with people who work in the field. And, given the difficulty of finding a job in today’s (and probably tomorrow’s) environment, you should do this with great purpose and discipline.

A Guide for the Passionless (Steps 3 and 4 Continued)

What if you don’t have, or have not yet discovered, your dream or your passion? Do you really need one? It depends on your circumstances.

If you’re already “Acing” all your courses, star in your high school’s sports teams, and are involved in extracurricular and community activities, don’t rush into a specific passion. You probably already have most, if not all, of the drive you will need. If you want to or are inspired to dedicate extra effort to an endeavor in which you have a particular interest, go for it (as long as your grades and efforts in other areas don’t suffer).

On the other hand, if you are plodding along with average or slightly above average grades, haven’t found any area in which you are particularly interested or in which you excel, you have to push yourself. This is especially true if you, as I did in high school and college:

• Did reasonably well without putting in any real effort; or

• Devoted far more attention and energy to fun and socializing, than to learning or attempting to master some discipline or function.

When I graduated from college in the early 1970s, only about 12 percent of working-age Americans had college degrees. Practically any type of BA, from almost any college, was probably sufficient to get some type of college-level job. By the time I got my JD and MBA degrees (at the top of my business school class but in the bottom half of my law school class), I had a choice of decent (not from top law firms or corporations, but still decent) offers for jobs that combined both law and business.

This, however, is not your father’s or your grandfather’s job market. Today, unless you graduate from a Top 10 school, earn a degree in a high-demand field (especially in many STEM disciplines), or have some special distinction or accomplishments, you may, as discussed in Chapter 1, be lucky to get a job that even requires a college degree, much less a good job in your field.

If you are like I was in the 1970s, just drifting through school, waiting for inspiration to strike, you better get moving. You have to redouble your focus on those subjects and activities in which you currently have interest and actively search for something—almost anything—that will spur your passion to learn and to master some field. Whether you are preparing for college admission or a job out of high school, you have to at least have one or, ideally, two or more skills and accomplishments that demonstrate your ability to focus on and to reach a challenging goal.

As discussed in Chapter 5, this initial passion can be just about anything—as long as you have the motivation to master and to excel in that field. The next step is to establish some type of initial career vision around this passion. Don’t worry about building a long-term career around your initial passion as your passions and your goals will almost certainly change many times as you learn more of that field and discover others.

Nor is it necessary that your initial passion have anything to do with your ultimate career. The important thing is that you begin thinking about how you can convert your interests and skills into career options, laying out the steps you will have to take to turn these options into job offers—and to begin this process NOW. The longer you wait, the further behind you will fall and the more options that will be foreclosed to you. Besides, just like in chess and soccer, the more you learn and practice the underlying skills, the better you are likely to perform in the actual match.

Don’t know where to find the motivational spark? One of the aptitude or personality tests discussed in Chapter 5 could be a good place to start. But whatever road you take to discovering your passion (or some other type of motivator), don’t use the fact that you don’t know your ultimate career goal as an excuse for delaying the process. After all, you probably won’t know your ultimate career goal until you are in your 30s, 40s, or even older (hopefully after fulfilling jobs or careers in one or more fields).

Creating and Cultivating Your Professional Brand (Step 5)

Once you’ve identified your passions, taken an inventory of your interests, and objectively validated your skills, you are ready to begin creating the personal, and eventually, the professional “brand” that will help guide and position you through your entire career.

This brand is essentially a concise, abbreviated form of your identity—a few carefully selected words, images, and attributes that you want people to think of when they see you or hear your name. This branding process can begin when you are in elementary and middle school. In its initial iterations, it can represent your current identity: a combination of who you are, what you love, and what you’re good at. By the time you’re in college, however, your brand should represent your aspirational identity: not only who you are, but what you want to do, how you want to be perceived, and the type of value you want to be seen as providing to employers or clients.

Just as importantly, this brand must be specific to you. It must differentiate you on the basis of your unique skills, capabilities, and personal traits. Counting on your degree in marketing or biology to provide sufficient specialization may not get you very far. To really differentiate yourself:

• Your skills should be highly specific. This may come from an incredibly deep focus in a specific field (something of a “microspecialty”) or by combining two of your core skills or college majors in a way that gives you a competitive advantage in your field and that makes you particularly attractive to your target employers or clients. Examples of this type of interdisciplinary “macrospecialization” may include a mechanical engineer with a well-integrated dual major in urban transportation; a law degree with a mechanical or bioengineering undergraduate to prepare you to practice intellectual property law; or a software architecture degree with a specialty in statistics and the analysis of the type of “Big Data” that is being generated by today’s technology.2

• Your traits should include those that let you deliver your unique value proposition in the most effective way. Thinking back to the Core and the High-Value Skills discussed in Chapter 3, for example, they can include the cognitive and creative skills that enable you to address problems in new ways, the leadership and collaboration skills that will allow you to bring teams to consensus, or the determination and organizational skills to see complex projects through to the end.

You should also be able to validate the depth of these skills (as through certificates, recognitions, awards, and by documentation in your digital portfolio) and most importantly, explain exactly how you can apply these skills to provide a high level of unique value to your prospective employers or clients.

Brands, however, cannot be stable or immutable. Just as your passions, your skills, and your career objectives will evolve, so too must your brand. After all, brands, like bread, can become stale. They should be in a continual state of evolution, continually adapting not only to changes in your own skills and interests but also to changes in the economy, in the market, and in new learnings from your experiences and from the feedback that you receive.

Consider, for example, the ABZ planning concept set forth by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha in their book, The Start-up of You:3

• Plan A is your current path;

• Plan B is an adaptation in which you adjust your original plan to account for changes in your goal or to new learnings that suggest your original plan may not quite work as anticipated; and

• Plan Z is a fallback position in the unfortunate case where, after going through multiple iterations on Plan B, you decide that your plan just won’t work and that it is time to try something else.

But regardless of how many or how dramatic the shifts you make in your objectives, your education, or your career, you must be able to explain these twists, turns, and setbacks in a way that will present even the most seemingly obscure and damaging shifts as part of a logical progression or invaluable learning experience that will allow you to deliver even greater value to a prospective employer.

Remember, however, that just as brands must be continually polished and tuned, they can also be tarnished or destroyed, as by poor performance on a job or a project, an insensitive remark made public, or by an unfortunate Facebook post.

This brings up the entire topic of social media. When used properly, tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter can be incredibly powerful and valuable tools for communicating and enhancing your brand and for building your network. When used poorly, they can sideline even the best plans.

Validating the Market (Step 6)

Although developing a passion or some type of motivational spark is important, you have to perform a high-level reality check before you go too far. For example, are you capable of developing the skills that you will need to meet the minimum bar for entry into the field? Do you have the required physical attributes? Are you capable of and willing to endure whatever course of study or training is required?

Once you identify a broad career that you think has the potential of allowing you to live your passion, you have to objectively assess the opportunities for actually scoring a job in that profession. Not just this, but also how viable these jobs are likely to be in the future, how forces such as technology and globalization will likely affect them, how well they are likely to pay, and the ability to build a long-term career in your preferred field. You should also objectively assess whether you, of all the people who are likely to be competing for the same entry-level job, have a reasonable potential of getting the job. This is all before you begin to develop a plan as to how to prepare for that job.

I’m not suggesting that you should automatically dismiss a career where your odds of entry (much less success), the pay, and opportunities for a long-term career are low. But before you commit to a particular field, you need to understand the odds of getting a job, and be prepared to make deliberate tradeoffs as to how much time and effort you should put into achieving this particular goal, at the expense of your other goals. Also recognize that your first job is likely to be only a temporary stop on your way to a long-term career that may have little to do with your initial position. To the extent that you have begun thinking about your longer term options, you may wish to begin thinking about the types of skills you will need for them and, if appropriate, how you may be able to use your first job as a steppingstone into a future career.

Think back to Chapter 5’s 5′2″ aspiring pro basketball player example. We know, at least intuitively, that the odds of making a pro-sports team are infinitesimal. And even if you make it, your career may be short and, contrary to the image of league stars, may not result in sufficient money to fund your retirement.

This being said, many sports have relatively structured winnowing processes that will allow you (not to speak of your current and prospective coaches) to assess your prospects along the way. If you can’t make your high-school junior varsity team, your odds of a pro career are probably pretty slim. But if you star in high school, win a scholarship from and star for a top-ranked college, make All-American teams, and are heavily recruited by the pros, you can track and adjust your plans along the way (all while still recognizing that not all star NCAA (National College Athletic Association) players make it in the pros, or even semipros).

The same is true in some other professions. If you want to be a doctor, you must first get into and do very, very well in college and a demanding regimen of very technical courses. Then you must be admitted to and get through medical school, survive 80-hour per week internships, be accepted into one of the highly competitive residency programs, pass your boards and so forth.

While most professions have less formal and less structured programs, if you pay attention, you can usually pick up hints as to how you are faring relative to others. Although you shouldn’t allow a few cases of negative feedback to derail your plans, a series of setbacks should prompt you to think more deeply about your objective. You may, for example, decide to double down and work harder (persistence), adapt your approach to achieving your goals (adaptability), or to stop beating your head against the proverbial wall and try something else and go on to Plan B, or Plan Z.

Selecting, pursuing, getting a job in and advancing through a career path is an iterative process. You must try an approach, collect feedback, assess the results, and plan your next step.

The good news is that there’s typically more than one single path to success in virtually any career. Even if you don’t follow the traditional path, lightning may strike. Prospective lawyers don’t have to attend the best law school or even pass the bar exam on your first try (or even in the first state in which you attempt it) to become a great trial lawyer or judge. An aspiring athlete who is not drafted still has the potential to earn a walk-on try-out. Nor do you necessarily have to graduate from college (much less have a Harvard MBA) to create your own social networking company or become CEO of a major corporation. Even the greatest obstacles can be overcome with skill, determination, and hard work.

Determine what you have to do to achieve your dream. Objectively evaluate your prospects and the potential for and likely cost of failure, as well as the rewards for success. If, after this, you’re still committed, go for it!

But just because there may be a possibility of achieving your goal, it doesn’t mean you should bet your entire future on it. Remember, as the ubiquitous NCAA commercial says, “there are over 380,000 student-athletes. . . . and just about every one of them will go pro in something other than sports.” The same can be said of premed students and aspiring artists and entertainers.

The Costs of Following Your Passion (Step 6 Continued)

Even, after thoughtful deliberation, you may decide to pursue your dream. Then another piece of reality interferes—money!

Financial considerations come in many different flavors. We all know about the incredibly steep and rapidly rising costs of a college (much less a graduate school) education and the burdens that are imposed by the growing mountains of student loan debt. (See Financing Your Education in Chapter 8.) There are also opportunity costs. Assuming you can get a job in the first place, you will forgo salary and advancement opportunities while you are in school and also might earn no or very little money while you are waiting for your dream job to materialize, or at least to pay off.

Many of these dream jobs, however, never materialize at all. Or when they do, they may not pay very well. Humanities graduate unemployment rates, even after more than three years of economic recovery, still range between 9 and 10 percent.4 And while graduates with such degrees often incur student loan debt that must be repaid, humanities’ graduate salaries (for those who manage to get full-time jobs) tend to average only about $40,000 per year.5

Meanwhile, we all know about starving artists, bands that are forced to play for tips on street corners, and aspiring poets and novelists who scrape by waiting tables or driving cabs. But how about starving philosophy and anthropology PhDs who are living on infinitesimal post-doc or adjunct professor salaries in hope of securing a coveted, but increasingly rare, tenure-track position?

They can incur more than $500,000 in costs during four years in college and five-to-seven years of grad school. Post-graduation debt payments can be crippling, even for the small percentage who do manage to earn an Assistant Professorship. Not, of course, that they have many choices. There tends to be little demand for humanities PhDs in the corporate world.

Or how about starving lawyers? Law school graduates typically require seven years of education and routinely rack up loans of $100,000 or more. Those who get jobs at top national law firms often start at about $160,000 per year. Those few who make partner can pocket over $1 million per year. In reality, however, fewer than eight percent of all law school graduates win such coveted positions. According to the American Bar Association, the median salary of those 2012 grads who got full-time jobs is $61,000.6 Such figures, however, have little meaning for the 15 percent of 2012 law school graduates who were unemployed at the time of the survey, or for the 35 percent who were unable to get jobs practicing law.

Anyone looking to choose a career should understand the employment prospects for their chosen field. What percentage of those who graduate with a degree in your major—and from your school—end up getting a job in that field, or any other full-time job? What types of salaries do they typically earn? How do such results vary among different colleges? By major in that college? And how much debt are you likely to incur—and what portion of your anticipated salaries will be consumed by debt repayment?

A number of private sector companies (including Manpower and Monster.com), nonprofit organizations (The Pew Foundation, the National Association of Colleges and Employers and others), and government agencies (especially the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS) regularly publish reports that provide glimpses into these and a range of other statistics. ACT (the organization that develops the college admissions test), for example, offers tools that allow you to understand the nature, salaries, and requirements of jobs7 in different fields, what you should look for in colleges8 and what different majors9 entail. O*NET, meanwhile, provides detailed information on the responsibilities and primary activities, knowledge and skill requirements, wage ranges and employment growth projections, lists of current job openings for hundreds of different occupations, and suggestions of related fields.10

Meanwhile, a handful of companies, states and most recently, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) have introduced scorecards. DOE’s College Scorecard, for example, now compiles and publishes data on the cost of getting a degree in a specific field from different colleges and universities, the rates of graduation, average debt loads, and loan default rates.11 They plan to add employment and salary data later this year.

The ability to systematically compare such data by college, by major, and by profession will be a great help. However, by their very nature, such comparisons are based on historical data. As we have seen over and over again, history does not necessarily provide a roadmap to the future. The number of jobs being created in individual industries and professions, and the salaries they pay, can vary greatly over a few years based on factors including economic, demographic, and technological trends. How then can a high school student, or even a college freshman, get a glimpse of future employment and salary before they decide on a college or select a major?

Although nobody’s crystal ball is particularly clear these days, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics attempts to forecast such information in its comprehensive, bi-annual Occupational Outlook Handbook (of which the 2012/2013 edition is the latest), and its veritable blizzard of interim updates and analyses.12 These include specialized student information13 and regular drilldowns into specific industries14 and occupations.15

These BLS reports provide projections including the growth rates and the number of jobs likely to be created (and in some cases, eliminated) in 580 different occupations, the type and amount of education and training required for each, and the range of salaries that entrants in the field can expect. They summarize those occupations that are likely to produce the greatest number of jobs, grow at the fastest rates, and pay the largest salaries as well as provide regular updates of helpful drilldowns into some of the more popular occupations. Although any such projections must be taken with a grain of salt, they can be indispensable resources.

Information Networking (Step 7)

Speaking of indispensable resources, there is another invaluable source for the type of career information or suggestions that you seldom find in published studies—a resource that you can’t afford not to take advantage of—individuals who know or work in the field in which you have an interest.

Can’t think of a career option that suits you? Can’t narrow the list to a number of choices that are manageable? Or perhaps you do have some thoughts about potential careers and have read all about them, but still can’t decide which choices are best for you or how to proceed? That’s where an information network comes in. In fact, this type of network may be even more valuable to someone who knows exactly what they want to do. These networks can help you really learn what these careers entail, provide opportunities to see people actually working in these fields, or even put you in a position to be offered or to apply for an internship or work part time.

Many of us may initially learn about a career, such as detective work, lawyering, nursing, or cooking, from watching a program or movie or by reading a book. Whatever the source, you probably begin with a highly selective, often glamorized view. What is it really like to work, day after day, year after year, in the career you imagine? What are the day-to-day requirements? Think about the practice of law. You may want to know:

• What percentage of law school graduates actually get jobs at the major law firms?

• How many even manage to get jobs that require a law degree?

• What are the opportunities for those who graduate from law school, but never get a job practicing law? How much of a lawyer’s actual time is spent in research, writing, or administrative work, rather than in court? For that matter, what percentage of lawyers in various disciplines ever even see a courtroom?

• How many hours a week will you be required to bill and how many total hours of work will this require?

• What are the ethical dilemmas you may face in accepting or representing clients with whose views you may not share?

• How will the growing role of contract workforces, automation, and outsourcing affect long-term job prospects?

• What are the odds of making partner and how long will it take?

• What are the opportunities for the vast number of associates who do not make partner?

You are not going to get answers to most of these questions by watching television or by reading law school brochures or searching the web. But to truly understand the opportunities and pitfalls of practicing law, you should actually speak with those who practice, those who used to practice, those who prepared for a career in law but ended up not practicing, and those who began practicing law but then changed to another profession.

Remember back in Chapter 5, where I discussed the importance of developing a network of objective people to help you objectively assess your capabilities and your skills? That is only the first of many, many needs you will have for a network in your effort to develop a lifelong career. The second is to develop a network that can help you assess your potential career interests.

How do you begin building this network? A perfect place to start is if one of your parents, your relatives, or your parents’ friends practice law. Also, remember the teachers and counselors you spoke with about your strengths? They too may make good starting points. Although they may not necessarily know anything about the field you are exploring, they know people who do. Or they may know people who know other people who know someone in that field. At the end of any of these conversations, ask whether the person you are speaking with can recommend other people with whom they think you should speak. Ideally, they may even be able to make an introduction.

Or, you can search the Internet to find someone in the profession you wish to explore. Contact them, tell them what you are looking for, and ask if you can talk with them or, ideally, meet them at their offices.

Once you find these people, you can ask specific questions about the profession, what it’s like to work in their field, what the job entails, what types of skills are required, what education they needed to get the job, and so forth. They are also among the people you want to ask about the requirements for entry into this field, the types of courses and activities that may best prepare you, the books you should read, and of course additional referrals to other people in their field, in complementary fields, or other areas that they may recommend. There is, after all, no such thing as having too much information about a field in which you may spend your entire career.

Are you reluctant to contact a professional in a field you do not yet know, especially if you are still in high school? Don’t be. Most people are honored to be asked for their advice. They will be happy to spend a half hour with you and share their opinions. This is particularly true if you have done preliminary research and demonstrate that you ask perceptive questions that you are serious. Not only will most be happy to speak with you, many will be happy to refer you to others. If someone refuses your request, don’t take it personally. Try someone else.

The primary goal of such information interviews is to better understand the opportunities and the actual work involved in the profession—and whether it will be a good match for your passions and your talents. They may occasionally yield unexpected benefits. Who knows, if you sufficiently impress the interviewee (and if they have a need), they may even consider offering you an opportunity to assist in their office, or to shadow them to see what they do in a typical day. Or, if you are really ambitious, when you find a firm that is particularly interesting and in which you particularly like the people, you may even venture to ask if there may be any opportunity for you to volunteer or intern on a temporary, part-time basis in return for an opportunity to see, first-hand, what the work is like.

True, any such tasks will be very basic and the pay (if there is any) will be minimal. Even so, this could provide an unparalleled chance for you to see the day-to-day work, give you an opportunity to ask more questions as they arise, and provide you with relevant experience to put on your resume. And who knows, if they are really impressed, it may even result in a full-time job offer.

But no matter how focused you are on a particular field or profession, life offers few certainties. You may lose interest, or discover another field that sounds even more interesting. You may discover that the field is shrinking and offers few employment, much less long-term career prospects. You may not be willing to devote the number of years, or afford the cost required to prepare for the job you envision.

Building Flexibility into Your Plan (Step 8)

One thing is certain: No matter how carefully you plan your life and your career, it will not work out as you planned. Nor should you want it to.

Sometimes these surprises are sprung upon you from outside; sometimes you change your mind or your passion; other times, new information or insight prompts you to tweak your plan. Some, such as an inability to get a job in your chosen profession, a layoff, or a serious illness, can force you to change your plans in ways that you do not want. Others, such as a decision to pursue a new passion or a surprise offer of a new career opportunity, can be exhilarating.

Since you know things will change, why not build shock absorbers directly into your career? There are, as discussed here, many ways of doing this. Examples include:

• Developing skills in high-demand, highly leverageable professions, such as nursing, software engineering, or finance. These fields offer enough opportunities that virtually anybody with the requisite qualifications can probably get a good job. It may not necessarily be in the particular specialty, the city, or the company you prefer, but you will almost certainly get some type of decent job. And even if you can’t get one specifically in your field, these skills can be valuable in and give you a big advantage in getting another job. Nurses, for example, are often valued and can help you get a job in medical insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, or medical device manufacturing companies. Software engineers can find plenty of opportunities (although not necessarily at Twitter or Google) in fields including corporate software development, technical service, sales, and IT management.

• Searching for the type of breaking waves that will create a broad range of ways in which you can apply your skills to your passions. These waves can be created by the emergence of new technologies, new industries, sweeping taste, or demographic trends or any other type of big change. If you can get into this new field early, you can ride its growth. Working for a fast-growing company, as discussed in detail in Chapter 10, can provide great opportunities for the fast advancement or for changing roles in your company. Experience in a new field can also make you an attractive recruit for other companies in this industry or even provide you with the germ of an idea for launching your own company.

• Planning for uncertainty, as through the type of ABZ planning that facilitates not only the modification of an existing plan but also a fallback position in case plans, A, B, C, and so forth, just don’t work out.

• Preparing yourself for a safety career that, as discussed later, not only provides a vehicle for working in a field in which you have a passion (even if you can’t get your dream job) but may also open a number of alternate career opportunities.

Let’s begin exploring these shock absorbers by looking briefly at some of the ways you can develop and use complementary and leverageable skills to not only expand your career options but also develop the type of specialized skills that can form the basis for the type of high-value specialization that will allow you to create your own highly differentiated brand.

Career Leverage Points (Steps 8 and 9)

Some courses of study are more leverageable than others. Law, as mentioned, can be leveraged into all types of fields. There are, however, many other examples.

• Biology is critical for virtually any professional job in healthcare—one of the largest and fastest growing sources of jobs in the world, not to speak of the country.

• Business degrees can help in virtually any field, in preparing to start or run your own business and in many segments of your nonbusiness life (such as in preparing budgets, working in teams, and in assessing the implications of current events).

• Software engineering is and will continue to be one of the hottest and most lucrative job markets in the country for decades to come. But even if you don’t become a programmer, this skill will probably be valuable in almost any career you end up in. You should, at the very least, be able to quickly write a basic program to access and analyze information that will help you in your actual job, whether it is in marketing, economics, psychology, or virtually any other type of knowledge work.

• Math and statistics skills are becoming increasingly valuable in virtually every industry as the Internet begins to generate huge volumes of data that must be analyzed and acted upon. Such skills are becoming increasingly critical in areas such as marketing (as around web marketing campaigns), civil engineering (as sensors and actuators become incorporated into structures), and even medical research (as in assessing the incidence and concentrations of diseases, effectiveness of different treatment regimens, and so forth). Even if you don’t directly create or analyze these data, you will have to interpret the findings of these professionals and understand how to apply them to your own work.

• English, although not offering many direct career opportunities, is valuable in virtually any job in which you have to communicate, whether by writing or speaking.

But what about other areas of study, such as many of the fine arts, liberal arts, and humanities disciplines that don’t necessarily prepare you for a specific job, and are generally less valued by employers?

First, these fields are often much better than many of the career-oriented programs in helping one develop the conceptualization, critical thinking, creative and writing skills writing skills that everyone will need to compete in the 21st century economy (see Chapter 4. Even if they won’t directly prepare you for many jobs, they can provide good foundations for law school or for graduate business school.

A degree—virtually any degree—should, therefore, be viewed not just as a qualification for a potential job, but as a foundation on which to build a range of complementary skills. It is this combination that will form the foundation of your own unique brand—the type of brand that will give you an advantage in:

• Differentiating you in your effort to secure your dream job;

• Preparing you for jobs in a broad range of jobs that are related to (not to speak of many that are not directly related to) your dream job; and

• Providing a unique perspective on, and making unique contributions to any field you may eventually enter.

You can, therefore, usually find a way of incorporating virtually any interest, any skill, and any college major into your career plan. It may require creative thinking and some particularly creative explanations, but you may even be able to turn your unique combination of interests and skills into an advantage in getting a job. This is particularly true if you can integrate deep interests and skills in two or more complementary areas into a unique qualification.

The question, therefore, isn’t whether a degree in a particular field will prepare you for a job. It is how you will use this degree as a foundation on which you can build your own differentiated and highly marketable brand.

Of Dream Careers and Safety Careers (Step 9)

I have mentioned the concept of a safety career in previous chapters. But just what is a safety career and why is it so important to have one? To understand, start with the generally self-explanatory concept of a dream career. A dream career is just what it sounds like—a career that allows you to do what you love. This can be playing golf or basketball, acting, writing, finding a cure for cancer, designing robots, saving the environment, or helping elderly people manage their day-to-day lives. It can be anything for which you have a passion and a commitment. The key is in discovering and nurturing your passion.

But even if you have a passion, building an emotionally engaging, financially secure (if not necessarily financially rewarding) career around a dream job can be challenging. Some passions, like playing professional basketball, can be psychically rewarding and pay extraordinarily well, but the odds of making it into the NBA, much less of establishing a solid, long-lasting professional career, are tiny. So too with acting, music, art and even a number of rigorous academic pursuits, such as philosophy or anthropology.

At the other extreme, it is very easy for most people to get a job helping elderly people—especially with the nation’s rapidly growing aging population. However, finding a job in this field that will allow you to earn a living wage can be difficult. Building a career around the dream of finding a cure for cancer has its own challenges, not the least of which are earning and paying for the type of M.D. and/or PhD degrees that are generally required to get a job in serious cancer research.

The bad news is that pursuing a career based on one’s passion can be a long, expensive, and frustrating pursuit. The good news is that no matter how long the odds, you can take a number of steps to dramatically improve your odds of landing your dream job and building your dream career.

This, however, is not to suggest that you put all your career eggs in a single basket. Commitment and perseverance are certainly critical (not just in your dream career, but in many other life pursuits), but you also need to be realistic and adaptable. You need to balance commitment and perseverance with realism and objectivity and go into it with your eyes wide open. You must, for example:

• Objectively assess your chances and the obstacles you will face in getting your dream job;

• Fully understand and balance the time and cost of preparing for this career with the job satisfaction and the income you can realistically expect; and

• Ensure that you will have the broad skills, the experience, and the credentials that will not only prepare you for this job but also give you an advantage over other applicants.

You must then develop and embark on a systematic effort to get and succeed in your dream career. But everyone, regardless of how deep your commitment or how strong your chances of getting your dream job, needs a contingency plan. What if, after years of trying, you don’t reach your goals? What if you achieve these goals but, after a short career, you lose that job or discover that your dream job is not really quite as dreamy as you had imagined? What will you do next?

Career contingency planning is important throughout your entire career. It is particularly critical at the very beginning of your career; before you really know if you will be able to get a good job in your chosen field; before you have the experience to understand what working in that job will really entail; and before you take on the type of financial and family commitments that increase the risk of career change.

That’s where a safety career comes in. A safety career is one:

• For which jobs are most likely to be available (such as accounting, finance, and sales jobs as well as many STEM, healthcare, or primary and special education fields); and

• That builds upon some of your particular interests and strengths (writing, speaking, empathy, creativity, cognition, etc.).

In other words, a safety career is something of an insurance policy; like applying for a safety school in case you don’t get into the college of your dreams. It is however, much more. Unlike the case with applying for a safety school, the very approach of simultaneously preparing for both a dream and safety career can improve your qualifications for and your chances of getting a job in each of these fields by preparing you to provide more value to an employer. Just as importantly, it can also put you in a better position to control your own career, rather than leaving that control in the hands of an employer or the economy.

Ideally, this safety career may also be tied into your passion. Say, for example, that you love and know everything there is to know about sports, but question whether you will make it into the field, or be able to earn a living as a pro. What are some of your other interests and skills? How can you apply them to sports in a way that will allow you to build a career out of them?

Sounds a bit abstract? Let’s look at a few examples of potential safety careers.

If You Can’t Get in the Front Door, Find a Window (Step 9 Continued)

Say you love and are great at golf and you and your golf coach see a potential for you to go professional. You should work hard—very hard—at your game, but not to the exclusion of all else. After all, what if you don’t make it in the PGA, or you can’t earn a living from it—or your passion for golf fades as you get older and experience more things? What will you do when you’re too old for the tour, or if an injury shortens your career?

That’s where your other interests and skills come in. Even if you aren’t destined to be the next Tiger Woods, you can still build a career around golf in a number of other ways. If you enjoy and are good at teaching, what about becoming a teaching pro? If you’re good at forming relationships and negotiating, perhaps a sports agent? If you like math, perhaps become an investment advisor or accountant specializing in sports? Analysis and writing? You might like to be a sports attorney. If you are also interested in business, you might consider managing a golf course, a country club, or running golf tours. Computers? What about working on the PGA website? Chemistry or physics? Think about becoming an engineer designing next-generation clubs or balls.

What if none of these appeal to you right now? You might be surprised. Take some time to learn a little about them. Read and talk with more people to find ideas. Options for designing safety careers around a dream career are virtually endless. The more you explore these options, the more other additional possibilities will appear.

That’s exactly what you want: To identify a few potential fields that mesh with your passion, to learn about them, to decide what you like and don’t like about each, examine how well they are suited to your needs (and you to theirs), and to identify and explore other areas. The more you learn and explore, the more options you will discover—or better yet, identify opportunities or market needs that have not yet been identified or are not currently being addressed and come up with a totally new way of addressing them.

Perhaps none of these options will result in a life in which you spend every minute golfing, but they may have the potential of allowing you to develop a viable career that will allow you to live—and earn a living—in and around the world of golf.

The concept of safety careers applies to any field.

• What if you planned a career in law, but ended up one of the 35 percent of law school graduates who can’t get a job practicing law and you don’t want to open your own practice? First of all, virtually every career will benefit from the research, analysis, reasoning, and writing skills that you hone in law school. Even if you don’t work specifically in law, combining this background with an undergraduate or graduate degree in accounting or finance can position you very well for a career as a tax accountant. Work in contracts can help in all types of careers, such as banking and real estate. Law degrees, meanwhile, have also become almost a de facto qualification for a career in politics. True, three years spent in school plus well over $100,000 in tuition may be costly insurance, but you will almost always get some value from law school.

• Want to be a doctor, but can’t get into—or can’t pay for—medical school? You could leverage your undergraduate pre-med studies into a job as a nurse or a nurse practitioner (both of which will continue to experience huge demand) and then apply for medical school in the future. Or you could apply to dentistry, optometry, or veterinary schools. If you love medicine, but can’t pass Chemistry 101, think about being a hospital administrator, a pharmaceutical salesperson, or a malpractice attorney. Or even a hospital orderly or home healthcare aide.

The point of this long discussion of contingency planning is that you can no longer just plan for a career. You also have to plan for contingencies—virtually all contingencies. Nor can you limit the type of skills you develop because you don’t expect to need them in the future. Possessing a broad range of skills is critical for almost any job in the creative economy. It is also instrumental in preparing you to capitalize on unanticipated opportunities and in recovering from unanticipated career or life shocks.

Having these skills can even create new opportunities. A friend or colleague, from the extensive network that you build and cultivate, may present you with a new opportunity of which you had never dreamed. Or you may be reading something far out of your primary area of focus that ends up sparking a new passion. Such opportunities can cause you to rethink your entire career plan, or they may provide complementary experiences that will allow you to resume your original career with an entirely new (and differentiating) perspective or set of skills. They can also expand your network, which can present even more new opportunities.

Although a career plan is critical to getting on the first rung of a promising career path, no career will ever develop exactly as you have planned. Nor should you ever expect or want it to. You must always be prepared to:

• Modify or totally discard a plan that isn’t working as you expected;

• Recognize and take full advantage of an opportunity that you had not previously anticipated, even if it is totally contrary to your plan; and

• Convert every one of your career setbacks into a new opportunity.

From Skills Requirements to Skills Development (Step 10)

Now that you have identified a set of initial leverageable and complementary career opportunities that apply your skills to your passions, you have to determine the skills and credentials you will need. Not just the skills that will be required to qualify you for your target job, but those that will differentiate you from and give you an advantage over others that will be applying for the same job. Then when you add in the skills and personality traits you will require across your entire career (Chapter 3, you can begin to identify the type of post-secondary education and training you will need.

Some professions, such as teaching, engineering, the practice of medicine, or one of the many other branches of healthcare science, have strict requirements as to courses you must take, the certifications you must get and even the schools that are accredited to teach these courses. The vast majority of high-skill professions, however, offer far more flexibility. Even the practice of law, which still requires that you graduate from an accredited law school and pass a state bar exam, does not require a specific undergraduate field of study, provides total flexibility in courses beyond the first year (usually including courses from complementary graduate schools [business, public policy, and so forth]). Some state bars are even considering making the third-year of the law school courses optional, in favor of a one-year apprenticeship program.

Most high-skill professions, however, have even fewer requirements. Many, such as software development and management, even permit the substitution of informal education and demonstrated competence as an alternative to a formal education.

The good news is that there are now far more options for getting an education than ever before: Trade schools, boot camps, online classes, and many other options. Many colleges even allow you to substitute work experience, apprenticeships, independent study, and online courses for course-based credits. The bad news is that there are more options than ever and that some of the most popular—especially colleges—are becoming so expensive as to become cost-prohibitive for many families.

So what type of post-secondary education is right for you, with your own specific interests, career goals, learning style, and financial considerations? What type of education will not only prepare you for your dream and safety careers but also give you the long-term flexibility you will need to pursue new careers, as your interests or circumstances change—and simultaneously to maximize the value you can deliver in whichever career you choose?

Chapters 7 through 9 lay out the growing number of educational options, explain the roles, advantages and limitations of each, and provide guides to help you get the most out of each.