Another major part of the ideal job is working for the right organization. Determining what characteristics of an organization are most important to you will enable you to identify those companies that will be most likely to satisfy you. As you research companies and interview with them, you will use your detective skills and your intuition to determine which ones would fit you the best.
If you realize that you lack the focus required to carry out an effective job search, stop at this point and complete the exercises. You might easily spend 10 hours working on them, but the effort will be well worth it.
Career Decision Making
Once you know what you need to be satisfied in a career, you must still determine which occupations fit you. To do that, first examine the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), which describes the 300 major occupational fields in our economy. The OOH is available at all libraries. It will provide a wealth of information on careers, including the skills and knowledge needed, educational requirements, forecasts for the future growth of the field, salary ranges, and a description of the work itself.
You may find a field that really excites you. If so, you are in a good position. If nothing in the OOH particularly excites you, you should study the Dictionary of Occupational Titles {DOT), which describes the work performed in about 12,000 occupations. All libraries have it as well. The DOT does not provide salary or educational information, but it can be extremely helpful. No other resource contains so much occupation information. The descriptions are brief, but quite accurate.
If your chosen field would require a master's degree, but the very idea of going back to school gives you an anxiety attack, perhaps that field is not for you. On the other hand, before you give up, find out if there are people who have managed to get into that field without a master's degree. If they could do it, perhaps you could too.
Before you can make a decision about which occupations to pursue, you need to know a lot more about each occupation. Ask your librarian for help. All libraries have specific occupational books with titles like Your Career in the Airline Industry. Sometimes an entire book is devoted to a single occupation. Whatever resources your library or school has, read everything you can get your hands on. These books will describe occupations in much more detail than either the Occupational Outlook Handbook or the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. In a book such as the Public Relations Career Directory, you will find several occupations described. It contains such chapters as, "A Career In Public Relations," "The Growing World of Public Relations," " Ten Myths About Public Relations Firms,"" Working For The Federal Government," "Breaking Into Media Relations," and "A Career In Public Affairs." This 365-page book contains complete and accurate information about the field of public relations.
It takes this kind of reading and research to determine whether a field is really for you. Your goal is to reach a point where you are absolutely sure that a particular occupation will be a great fit for you. And you want to know both the upside and downside of any occupation you're considering. You don't want to invest hours of self-study or take courses only to discover, once you are in your job search or worse yet, on your first job, that there are major drawbacks that you did not know about.
Once you've thoroughly read about your occupational interests, you will probably be ready to narrow your choices. You should reduce your list to one or two fields. Do your best to find additional books describing the fields, and also begin reading textbooks and trade journals.
Trade journals are excellent sources of information about specific fields. Trade journals are simply magazines designed for specialists. Almost every industry and occupation has a trade journal. It can be useful for job seekers to read trade journals because their articles cover current practices as well as new ideas being tested in a field. Because the articles are written by people who are practicing in that profession, they'll give you a sense of what the field is really like. You can also pick up the jargon and language commonly used by people in that field. Knowing the jargon will be important later on when you start interviewing. Also, since employers will often ask you what you think about a particular issue, it helps to be familiar with issues that are current in a profession.
Several sources and guides are available to help you locate appropriate trade journals and other useful periodicals. Each of the resources identifies thousands of magazines, newsletters, newspapers, and journals, or other periodicals you should read to better understand your industry or field. The other resources frequently found in libraries include Gale Directory of Publications, Standard Periodical Directory, Newsletters in Print, and Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters.
That is why many of my clients will design their own job. Instead of starting with a job title, we begin with a description of what the person would ideally want to do. A certain amount of flexibility is built into the description. The client is not going to demand, for example, that exactly 21 % of her time is going to be devoted to a particular function. Usually the person will design a range of say, 15-25% of time spent doing a particular task or function. There might be activities that the person wants to perform, but is willing to forego for the right job. There may also be activities the person definitely wants to perform, but would be willing to spend 5% rather than 15% of her time doing if this is what it takes to design an overall job that is close to ideal.
Once we design the job, we determine whether there are people who already do this type of work. If so, the client needs to speak to them. If not, we have to determine what types of organizations might hire a person to do these things. Then a resume is created that will sell the person into exactly that type of job.
Designing a job is a fairly complex process. Give it a try on your own, but if you don't like your results, you may want to seek out a career counselor to help you get through this final stage. After reading The Three Boxes of Life, you may also want to consider taking a career exploration class at a community college.
