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#YourCareer : Facing A Tough Career Decision? Here’s How To Make The Right Choice. GReat REad for All!

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If you’re struggling with a big career decision, your underlying challenge likely involves either: a) properly evaluating the risk associated with a specific action, b) identifying and narrowing down a long list of options, or c) choosing between two or three good options.

While each of these challenges requires a different approach to get to the best decision, they all share the same first step: offloading the decision-making criteria in your brain onto a spreadsheet or sheet of paper, to ensure you’ve captured and accurately weighed them all.

The following techniques will help you to choose the best option when facing any of the scenarios described above.

How to properly evaluate risk

Perhaps you’re thinking of making a risky career move, such as quitting a job before finding another one, going for a new job or promotion that could lead to dissatisfaction, going back to school, retiring early or addressing a difficult situation with a colleague. To properly assess the risk, ask yourself these questions:

  • How likely is it that the thing I fear will happen?
  • If the fear materialized, how damaging would it be?
  • Can I do anything to mitigate the risk?
  • What’s the risk in NOT taking action and how likely is it to materialize?
  • If I do take action, how likely am I to receive the benefit?
  • If I do take action, how big will the benefit be?

In his Ted Talk, Tim Ferris describes an exercise he calls Fear Setting which enables you to score the answers to each of these questions. You can also download a template that facilitates this Fear Setting analysis.

 

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What Skill Sets Do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

Did you know?  First Sun Consulting, Llc (FSC) is celebrating over 30 years in the delivery of corporate & individual outplacement services & programs to over 1200 of our corporate clients in the U.S., Canada, the UK, & Mexico!  

We here at FSC want to thank each of our corporate partners for the opportunity in serving & moving each of their transitioning employee(s) rapidly toward employment!

Article continued …

One client was contemplating leaving her job without having another one lined up. She was very unhappy in her current role, had no time to find something else, and severance wasn’t an option. Yet she was reluctant to leave because of concern about both income loss and finding another job quickly. Doing this exercise led to her decision to quit, and she’s happily employed now. She realized:

  • The negative impact that staying in this role would have on her family was too great.
  • She could mitigate the possibility of her not finding another job by growing and leveraging her network and joining a professional association.
  • Her worst-case loss-of-income scenario wasn’t that bad; she might have to postpone retirement for two years, which she could live with.
  • The likely benefit of landing the right role was huge and potentially life transforming.

How to narrow down a long list of career options

In this situation, you’re unclear about the solutions to your career dissatisfaction because you don’t know all the options or which ones to pursue. Here’s what to do:

  1. Develop your decision-making criteria. You can use this post as a guide. Include the things you enjoy doing that you do well, your work-related values on which you don’t want to compromise, and your vision for your life.
  2. Brainstorm many career options. Keep in mind that the key to effective brainstorming is being open – you can always cross out items later. List these options in rows on a spreadsheet, or down the margin of a sheet of paper. If you need help coming up with ideas, ask people in your network, scan job postings, and check out these online resources.
  3. Add some very simple weighting to each of the decision-making criteria. Don’t make this overly complicated as the point is to quickly narrow down options. For example, start off by giving all your criteria an equal weight, say “1.” If a criterion is truly a deal-breaker if not met, then give it a large weight, say 10. For example, if you can’t take a job you would love because it pays below a certain level, then earning at least this amount would get a 10.
  4. Narrow down the list of options by scoring each of the job targets in the rows against your decision-making criteria in the columns; add up all the 1’s and the 10’s in that row.
  5. Focus on the highest-scoring items. To confirm their priority, do additional research or apply additional weighting as described below.

How to decide between two or three good career options

Once you’ve narrowed down a list of many options to just two or three, you can now more precisely weight your decision-making criteria to make your final decision. Add two types of weights:

  • How important the criterion is to you (scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most important)
  • How much of the criterion is present (scale of 0 to 3, where 0 is not present and 3 is fully present).

Score each option you’re evaluating by multiplying the importance of each criterion by the presence of that criterion. Then add up the scores across all the criteria to get a total. The table below shows how a client evaluated two job offers.decisionmaking table

Job Offer 2 got the higher score of 86, vs. 67 for Offer 1, because the opportunity to work virtually, higher salary, flexible schedule and opportunity to advance outweighed the drawbacks of a longer commute, less enjoyable colleagues, and less autonomy.

 

Forbes.com | November 16, 2022 | Robert Hellmann

#YourCareer : How To Find Direction In Your Job Search: The 3 Buckets Method. Great Way to Explore your Career Options/Direction.

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With unemployment hovering around 4% and a hot hiring market, one of the biggest challenges for many job seekers now is figuring out what they want. Often clients in this position are confused and paralyzed—they don’t know where to start. They may have no idea or lots of ideas but little direction. The title of Barbara Scher’s classic, “I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was” sums up what keeps a lot of potential job seekers stuck.

Lane, a project and production manager for an advertising agency, was burnt out and wanted a more humane culture and work that was mission-oriented. She was open to possibility but uncertain. “I’m all over the map,” she said. “I know I should be networking and pulling together my resume, but I’m not ready to talk to anyone yet. What am I even looking for?”

It turns out that this question cannot be answered by analysis or even deep reflection and introspection. Instead, Lane needed to get into action before she was she knew what she wanted, before she was ready. As London Business School professor Herminia Ibarra points out in her terrific book, “Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career,” most people need to act in order to gain insight into what job or career path will suit them. Acting first and then figuring out what you want contradicts traditional career advice to ”follow your dream.” But Ibarra urges us not to expect that we should, or even could, know our desired destination until we have walked at least a few small steps down the path to see how it feels.

Ibarra’s advice is similar to the recommendations of Stanford Design School professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ book, “Designing Your Life: How to Build A Well-Lived, Joyful Life.” Burnett and Evans also take an action-oriented approach to career exploration, based on design thinking. Instead of Ibarra’s language of experimentation, they call this phase “prototyping.” Think of it as finding your own personal product-market fit.

 

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What Skill Sets Do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

Did you know?  First Sun Consulting, LLc (FSC) is celebrating over 30 years in the delivery of corporate & individual outplacement services & programs to over 1200 of our corporate clients in the U.S., Canada, UK, & Mexico!  

We here at FSC want to thank each of corporate partners in the opportunity in serving & moving each of their transitioning employee(s) rapidly toward employment !

 

Article continued …

Whatever you call it, this time of exploration is about gathering data. First, you will need to identify options of roles to consider, which will function as your prototypes or hypotheses to test. Experimenting will help you to get the real-world data, information and experience that will help you identify what path you want to pursue.

One of my favorite exercises to use with clients is to brainstorm at least two possible jobs or roles within each of three categories or buckets.

  • Bucket 1: The logical next step. In this bucket, list roles that are clearly related to your current job and for which you have most of the skills and qualifications needed. For example, you could do the same role in the same industry but at a different company. You could stay in your company or organization and move to a different role that has some overlap with your current role. You could move up a level to be a manager or drop a level to being an individual contributor in the same function. In bucket 1, you have high confidence that you would be a strong candidate for the roles you list. If you were applying to college, bucket 1 would be your safety school.
  • Bucket 2: The stretch role. In this bucket, list roles or jobs that represent some degree of reach from your current role. You might consider an entirely different role or function where you hypothesize that many of the core competencies are similar. You might change industries or areas of expertise where there is an analogous or similar function. You might return to something you did earlier in your career and are uncertain whether your skills are up to date. In bucket 2, there is more uncertainty about fit, but also potentially more excitement and interest.
  • Bucket 3: The wild idea. This bucket is both the scariest and the most exciting. Here you want to list ideas that intrigue you even if they seem implausible. Roles in this category would represent a big shift and  involve some uncertainty or risk. You might even feel embarrassed to tell your friends. Perhaps you have dreamed of becoming a travel writer, starting a business, running for office, or going to medical school. Your bucket 3 ideas may seem outlandish or impossible. They also offer clues to what elements you find missing in your current life. And even if you can’t get a job now, they might represent an interest or skill area that you want to cultivate for a later chapter in your career.

If you have trouble making your lists, try asking a friend or colleague to brainstorm with you. Once you have at least 2-3 (or more) roles in each, review them and notice which ones are of interest. Do you observe any themes or commonalities? Do any make your heart sing (or sink?) Pick two—from different buckets—to explore and experiment with. For each idea, identify a few experiments. Your experiments should be easy, low-risk, and cheap. These could include: reading a book or article on a topic; taking a class; having an informational interview; writing a blog post; volunteering; attending a meet-up or conference.

Be clear about the hypothesis you are testing. For example, Lane’s bucket 1 hypothesis was that she might be happier at a mission driven ad agency and her bucket 2 hypothesis was that her project management and production skills from advertising would be transferable to the non-profit or museum sectors. She arranged informational interviews with various colleagues who had taken those paths. These conversations helped her to refine her hypotheses and continue her exploration. She was on her way!

If you are having a hard time knowing what you want or where to start, try it. The 3 Bucket Exercise can help you get unstuck and take action to explore and iterate—or prototype—your next career move.

 

Forbes.com | February 16, 2022 |  Hanna Hart