Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station.
—Paulo Coelho
Since the evidence suggests that recent college graduates “tend to bounce around for while they eventually find their professional footing and earn the paychecks to prove it,”56 it is imperative to understand that identifying your dream job may simply be unrealistic upon graduation. It is also unnecessary. Coupled with this dream job insanity is the pressure on college students to declare the “right” major in order to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their life.57 It’s common to hear parents ask their child: “How will that major help you land your dream job and figure out what to do with the rest of your life?” Even well-intentioned professionals fall into this “rest of your life trap.” One former Ivy League admissions counselor-turned consultant noted “the vast majority of high school students applying to college have no idea what they really want to do when they grow up. Even the ones who claim that they do … students shouldn’t panic. Instead, they should use their first year or two of college to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives.”58
Spending a year or two to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life is grossly misleading and simply unnecessary. Like the pursuit of “that one great love or soul mate, the pursuit of that dream job immediately after graduation, or at any point in one’s career for that matter, is misguided, unrealistic, and self-defeating.”59 This dream job approach also negates the ability to have more than one dream and clouds your vision of just how dynamic life could be if you allowed yourself an opportunity to view it as such. As Ted Turner’s father said to him, “Son, you be sure to set your goals so high that you can’t possibly accomplish them in one lifetime. That way you’ll always have something ahead of you. I made the mistake of setting my goals too low and now I’m having a hard time coming up with new ones.” If we force young professionals to answer the question “what is your dream job and what do you want to do with the rest of your life?,” we shift their focus to outcome instead of process. The intrusive parenting, pressure to achieve, and obsession over starting salaries has left an alarming imprint on young people already under tremendous stress.
For the past 20 years, there has been an alarming increase in the number of students seeking help for serious mental health problems at campus counseling centers. The 2010 National Survey of Counseling Center Directors (NSCCD)60 found that 44 percent of counseling center clients had severe psychological problems, a sharp increase from 16 percent in 2000.61 “The most common of these disorders were depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, alcohol abuse, eating disorders, and self-injury. A 2010 survey of students by the American College Health Association found that 45.6 percent of students surveyed reported feeling hopeless, and 30.7 percent reported feeling so depressed that it was difficult to function during the past 12 months.”62 “More incoming college students reported that they felt frequently overwhelmed during their senior year of high school (30.4% in 2012 vs. 28.5% in 2011). More than twice as many incoming female students (40.5%) reported feeling frequently overwhelmed as first-year male students (18.3%).63 “It’s a public health issue,” said Dr. Anthony L. Rostain, a psychiatrist and co-chairman of a University of Pennsylvania task force on students’ emotional health. “We’re expecting more of students: There’s a sense of having to compete in a global economy, and they think they have to be on top of their game all the time. It’s no wonder they feel overwhelmed.”64 Asking the “dream job and rest of your life” question is the second trap as it is virtually impossible to answer since it ignores that life is a journey, disregards personal growth, overlooks the evolutionary potential of your 20s, and is blind to the reality that people change jobs.
Life Is a Journey, Not a Destination
Demanding that college students figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives is a flawed mental trap. Such thinking exposes logic that believes a successful career can be determined by an exact formula and neatly quantifiable. This is simply untrue. Achievement on either the personal or professional levels seldom follows a simple formula. “Life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.”65 As John Gardner said in his famous 1990 speech, “Life is…an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own capacities for learning and the life situations in which we find ourselves.” Your dream job today may not exist tomorrow, let alone 5, 10, or 20 years from now. You’ve got to be open to whatever industry change comes your way. By demanding that young people declare a major that will help them figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives we are inadvertently stagnating their potential. This flawed thinking is training too many undergraduates to be “polite, striving, praise-addicted, grade-grubbing nonentities,” or as William Deresiewicz described them “Excellent Sheep.”66
Recent college graduates also need to understand that part of the journey might involve taking a job with a lower starting salary that they initially thought they would have to take. For example, 15 percent of those who college graduates from May 2013 said they expected to earn less than $25,000 a year, while 32 percent of the 2011 and 2012 graduates reported earning $25,000 or less.67 Millions of more experienced workers, however, know the plight of low pay as well. Of the 130 million jobs in the United States, 18 million pay less than $10 an hour and a startling 63 million pay between $10 and $20. Add it all up and you’ve got 81 million jobs (out of 130 million), or 62 percent of the population, earning less than $20 as an hourly wage.68 In order to transition out of a low-paying position and into a more lucrative career, young professionals across all majors need to develop a strong set of professional characteristics that include getting comfortable with ambiguity.
“Comfort with ambiguity” is among the most sought-after qualities in job candidates today. “In the past you looked for people with a certain playbook,” says Jeff Sanders, Vice Chairman of CEO and board practice at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. “Now you need people with relevant experience who are adaptable and quick learners.” According to Dilbert creator Scott Adams, “Chances are that the best job for you won’t become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready.”69 Instead of having one dream and one dream job, be a process-driven person instead of a goal-driven person. Once you land, your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal. “You have to dream big because no one else can dream for you. To some degree, you have to believe that you can dream and that you can figure out a way to get there.”70 “The inconvenient truth is that you will have to blaze your own trail and plot your own map for your journey.”71
In many cases, the journey from college graduation to having a success career, however one defines it, resembles more of a marathon than a sprint. Unfortunately many college students are either too exhausted or have not been educated to think of their lives beyond lading that initial job. The tremendous focus and pressure on landing a high-paying salary, besides being unrealistic far too often, is burning out young men and women. It’s impossible to see what life will be like in 20 years these days. It’s hard to look just 3 to 4 years in the future. They don’t know what they are striving for, which makes it really hard to move forward.72 Part of that journey involves a commitment to personal growth.
Personal Growth
In today’s challenging global economy “individuals are under unprecedented pressure to develop their own abilities more highly than ever before, quote apart anything their employers may or may not do to develop them.”73 Personal discipline, growth, and a commitment to lifelong development are critical elements that factor into one’s ability to achieve and sustain growth over a long career. In The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, authors Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha realize that great people, like great organizations, are in a state of perpetual growth. “They’re never finished and never fully developed.” Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, and grow more. This state of “permanent beta is a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth”74 is a necessity for everyone regardless of what major you declared. But remember, the path you will travel when launching your career will take years and consist of “big moments of panic, insecurity and fear. That’s not because you are awful, and your life is awful.”75 Those are just normal feelings. “The good news is that these moments of realization, panic, and their aftermath will slowly teach you the perspective to define your own idea of what ‘made it’ is all about. For some, it’s having kids, for others, no kids. Some hunger for the city, whereas others dream of living on a farm, or the suburbs. When you feel yourself stressing about these things, relax. There is always another day. Don’t worry about screwing up, you’ll figure it out as you go along. That’s how every person who’s really ‘made it’ has done it.”76 “It often takes many years to really understand one’s strengths and where one finds happiness. In a sense, I do think it’s unrealistic to assume a long sought-after job can bring one such happiness that one’s searching is done. We’re all a work in progress; new inputs—from new friends to new places visited—mean we’re constantly changing in our thoughts of what’s desired, what’s possible, what’s fun, and what we want to do.”
The flawed thinking with one’s dream job and the obsession to figure out what to do with the rest of one’s life also prohibits any sense of personal discovery following graduation. Self-determination requires a lifelong commitment to learning, self-discovery, and new life experiences. The flawed thinking behind the “rest of your life” mental trap would have you believe that following commencement one goes into some frozen state of personal development void of dealing with any external factors of influence in the future. That’s ridiculous of course, just as ludicrous as asking the question “what do you want to do with the rest of your life?” It’s an impossible question to answer with any degree of certainty. Asking such questions adds to the frustration and anxiety so often experienced by college students.
A more appropriate question would be, “what are you going to do after graduation?” That’s far easier to digest and certainly more feasible to answer. With the global marketplace changing so drastically, it is virtually impossible to predict what type of job one might have in 30 or 40 years. This lends itself to another important question to ask: “how did you grow personally during your college years and how do you hope to grow in the next year or two after graduation?” These questions align with the thinking of Hazel Rose Markus and her work with the three types of selves.
Hazel Rose Markus’ 1986 paper “Possible Selves” redefined how psychologists think of the relationship between self and culture. In it, co-author Paula Nurius and she develop the concept of possible selves: the ideal selves that we would like to become, that we could become, and that we are afraid of becoming.77 “A person’s identity involves more than the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the current self; it also includes reflections of what a person was like in the past and hopes and fears about what a person may become in the future.”78
We each have a repertoire of possible selves that serve as the “cognitive manifestation of enduring goals, aspirations, motives, fears, and threats [which] provide the essential link between the self-concept and motivation.” To suggest that there is a single self to which one “can be true” or an authentic self that one can know is to deny the rich network of potential that surrounds individuals and that is important in identifying and descriptive of them.79 Possible selves contribute to the fluidity or malleability of the self because they are differentially activated by the social situation and determine the nature of the working self-concept. At the same time, the individual’s hopes and fears, goals and threats, and the cognitive structures that carry them are defining features of the self-concept; these features provide some of the most compelling evidence of continuity of identity across time.
The conceptions we have of our possible selves allow us to develop a vision of our future, set goals in order to make that vision a reality, and establish patterns of behavior allow us to attain those goals.80 This development from one self to another, for example from the person we would like to become to who we could become, involves a substantial amount of experiencing, reflecting, and meaning making throughout one’s entire life. This process of self-awareness and personal growth in order to create your three selves continues long into the decade following college graduation.
The Evolutionary 20s
The decade after college graduation is a time for self-discovery. Many parents fail to realize that it takes time for their child to discover the right career path, get married, or become financially independent. In previous decades, a young man or woman in their late teens or early 20s would have had to decide on a career path, who to marry, and whether or not to enlist in the military. New research suggests that people are better equipped to make major life decisions in their late 20s than earlier in the decade. The brain, once thought to be fully grown after puberty, is still evolving into its adult shape well into a person’s third decade, pruning away unused connections and strengthening those that remain. Postponing those decisions makes sense biologically, he says. “It’s a good thing that the 20s are becoming a time for self-discovery.” “It should be reassuring for parents to know that it’s very typical in the 20s not to know what you’re going to do and change your mind and seem very unstable in your life.”81
Psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett who coined the phrase emerging adults describes college graduates as feeling in between adolescence and adulthood but still closely tied to their parents and family. In Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century, co-edited with Jennifer Lynn Tanner, Arnett describes five characteristics of emerging adulthood:82
• Age of identity exploration: Young professionals are exploring the transition from who they are to who they want to become. Doing so allows numerous opportunities to reflect on what they would like out of their careers as well as their personal lives and relationships.
• Age of instability: Living on campus in a dormitory, living in off-campus housing, and traveling to new locations are very common during the college and post-college period. Most settle down in their early 30s to create a more stable work and personal environment.
• Age of self-focus: Freed of the parent- and society-directed routine of school, young people try to decide what they want to do, where they want to go, and who they want to be with—before those choices get limited by the constraints of marriage, children, and a career.
• Age of feeling in between: Many emerging adults say they are taking responsibility for themselves, but still do not completely feel like an adult.
• Age of possibilities: Optimism reigns. Most emerging adults believe they have good chances of living “better than their parents did,” and even if their parents divorced, they believe they’ll find a lifelong soul mate.
The five characteristics of emerging adulthood can help us understand why people in their 20s pursue years of experimentation in both their personal and professional lives. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, 5 years in a little more than a generation.83 They also go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch.84 How can a college graduate know what he or she wants to do with the rest of his or her life when the reality is people of all ages, backgrounds frequently discover new employment opportunities?
The Reality Is People Change Jobs
Asking the “dream job and rest of your life” question negates the reality that people change jobs. Layoffs, quitting, and a host of other reasons explain why people move from one job to another. It is impossible to know what you want to do with the rest of your life at 22 when you have no idea what new jobs are 10 or 20 years out in the horizon. In 2011, 48,242,000 people changed jobs in the United States. Of those who changed jobs, 20 million were from layoffs and discharges, 23 million workers quit, and 4 million were classified as other separations.85 With 131 million total workers, the 48 million people who changed jobs represented 36.7 percent of the total working population. According to the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, roughly one in five American workers, roughly 30 million people, have been laid off during the 2009 to 2014 period raising new doubts about exactly how secure job stability really is within the United States.
Despite the number of layoffs in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous global marketplace, where full-time employment is growing more precarious, more than 2 million Americans are voluntarily leaving their jobs every month. Classified as “Quits” by the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the percentage of overall turnover has remained relatively steady at approximately 1.69 percent per month over the past decade, but the number of voluntary “quits” is continuing to grow and will not be decreasing anytime soon, according to the bureau.86 With the engagement of workers at a pathetic 13 percent globally and 30 percent in the United States, it is no surprise that LinkedIn reports 25 percent of its 313 million members are active job seekers with another 60 percent not proactively searching for a new job but seriously willing to consider opportunities.87 For many workers, however, despite the desire to change jobs, they are actually staying on their jobs longer. Fear, anxiety, and discomfort with switching to what could be a more lucrative, exciting or meaningful job is challenging for even the most self-determined individual. According to the BLS, U.S. workers had an average job tenure of 4.6 years in 2012 which is up from 3.7 years in 2002 and 3.5 in 1983, but the truth is employees stick with the same job longer today than they did 10, 20, and 30 years ago.88
Students are often mistakenly told to declare a specific major since it will allow them to have a secure job. In today’s hypercompetitive global marketplace job security has been replaced with job (in)security. As one observer noted, “If you are putting up with a boring job in exchange for security, you are not as secure as you think. That security which is the main reason most people go to work for a large organization is largely an illusion based on the way things were done 50 years ago.”89 During the last two decades, globalization, outsourcing, downsizing, recessions, and natural disasters have disrupted the world of work and now “job security can seem like a thing of the past.”90 Even assurances for long-term job security in established fields such as banking, medicine, or law are quickly becoming obsolete.91 Banking and working on Wall Street has grown less enticing as financial institutions have scaled back on bonuses and perks over the last few years, not to mention the physical and psychological ailments often associated with such high-pressure jobs. “Even physicians have become like everybody else: insecure, discontented, and anxious about the future, with only 6 percent of doctors describing their morale as positive.”92
It is also difficult to know what you want to do with the rest of your life when the world of work is changing so rapidly. “Every year, more than 30 million Americans work in jobs that did not exist in the previous quarter.”93 Today’s global economy driven by the information technological revolution is simply too fickle to guess what academic major will be practical for a 50-year career. Choosing the wrong major or path based on the current job market could make things worse, not better. As one observer noted, “guessing what will be hot tomorrow based on what’s hot today is often a fool’s errand.”94 Refer to the adjacent table for a brief list of extinct, new, and future careers. Appendix C offers a more comprehensive listing.
Table 6.1 The Careers of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Today’s students will have 10 to 14 jobs by the time they are 38.95 Since 47 percent of U.S. jobs96 could be automated in the next 20 years, “it is diabolically tricky to try to pick a career that you’ll still be doing when you’re 40.”97 It is important to remember that “the top 10 in-demand jobs in the future don’t exist today. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”98 One estimate suggests that more than half of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.99 According to one analysis, “by the time today’s college students retire from the workplace—in or around 2050(!)—they will have held jobs that neither exist in the lives nor the imaginations of many present-day leaders.”100