Taking an informed career decision 101

Are you bemused about making an informed career decision? After helping one of my juniors from undergraduate, I thought I could pen my thoughts so that others can also benefit from them.

This article had been divided into the following parts (If you are in a hurry, you can drop down towards the end of the article for the conclusion):

1. Introduction
2. Are you confused with too many options?
3. How to zero-in on one career?
4. Biases
5. The clock is ticking
6. Make the jump

Introduction

A lot of young students these days have a cornucopia of options to consider for their careers. There are two possibilities;

1. You have shaped up your student life in such a way that you are more or less sure about the impending career path.
2. You are somewhere in the middle with the majority of students with a modicum of options to select from.

Are you confused with too many options?

Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash

If you are one among the latter, then at some point in time you will have to make a decision about the career path you need to follow. It can be as early as in your first year of high school, or the first year of your undergraduate or as late as in the final year of your undergraduate. Why?

Well, just because you will have to fight for it. It’s not going to be served on a silver platter for you. There’s a lot of competition out in the world for that one job that you want, and you will have to push your way through it.

So, you cannot sit around to try all options at hand and then select the one that works for you. In theory, I would suggest that it would be the best practice to follow. But, pragmatically, such an option is not possible mostly because of the following reasons:

1. High competition
2. Exacting required time commitment(to prepare for an exam/placements/get a certification), and you have
3. Limited time

So, what to do? How to select one of them?

How to zero-in on one career?

Living in the 21st century, the adage “Information is King” holds true to this case also.

Photo by Saulo Mohana on Unsplash

You will want to acquire information about all the possible options you have. Possibly even search out for more options, for that golden career!

You will want to search for all the data about the factors that you think are going to implicate your decision. Few of them could be:

1. Average starting salary
2. Median starting salary
3. Growth opportunities/learning curve/ceilings
4. Job security
5. Work-life balance or time requirement of the job
6. Work profile or job description

So, you start. Start with online forums, sites like glassdoor, etc., Quora, conversations with your parents, relatives, your college seniors, the alumni of your institute.

But, when does it ends?

Never.

You will never be satiated. You could keep on surfing sites like Glassdoor or Quora, but there’s no end to it.

You could talk to five of your institute alumni working in disparate professional fields but then you would think to also talk to someone working in the public sector.

This is an incessant process. And, while you are doing all of this, a crucial thing is happening. What’s that?

The clock is ticking! More on this towards the end of the article.

But what’s the point of talking to all these people and getting all the data? You might make a Pros/Con- table of all the available options, or a SWOT analysis or a benefit-cost analysis. But, there’s still a good chance that you are not 100% sure about your decision. So, there’s a limit to this exercise of accumulating all the information. But what is the condition and when to stop?

Biases

Talking to all those people and collecting all the data is helping you create a predilection towards a certain career choice. You had a bias before you started off crunching all the information.

You started to ask different people because you wanted to get a realistic picture of all the factors like salary, work-life balance, etc. by talking to as many people as possible.

But, that’s not possible in reality. In reality, the people you talk to have their own proclivity and biases. And by talking to them, you are introduced to their bias about a particular career choice.

So, after crunching all the information you gathered, you are left with a hot, spicy mix of biases from all different kinds of people and online sites.

In the end, it becomes futile how much information you gather, it’ll stop making a difference after a certain point. The cutoff point. It is that point, at which you have adequate information to make a cogent decision. Everything after that does help you to improve your decision making by a small factor but that is at a great cost. There’s an opportunistic cost for it.

Time.

The clock is ticking!

You only have limited time. Every day matters. Every day carries the same value if you make the best out of it at the earliest. If you don’t, then the opportunistic cost of the remaining days keeps increasing. And you would not want to be in that position.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

After you have crossed that certain cutoff of gathering information, you need to make a decision. You will know yourself if you have crossed that certain cutoff, as the information will start saturating and you will already know most of the things.

And you don’t need to justify your decision to anyone. You don’t need to justify it to your best friend, batchmates, professors, or your family relatives.

Because it's your decision. You just need to justify it to you. You could certainly do all the rumination, pros, and cons, etc. to convince yourself.

Make the jump

Once you do it, you need to be 100% dedicated to your decision. And all your time should be dedicated to upskilling yourself towards that career choice, you made.

An interesting story from the history makes for a strong case in support of the above argument. The story of Polgar Sisters. Here’s a quick youtube video to familiarize yourself with the case, if you have not already heard about it:

If you were interested by the video, you might want to get a quick look at the website of Judit Polgar, the youngest of the sisters and the greatest female chess player of all time. And this medium article by Larry Maguire talks about the topic in detail.

The above video is a bit off-topic, but the argument that I wanted to stress from the above video was that your expertise is directly proportional to the number of hours you give towards your goal. Hence, your 100% dedication is very essential. Every hour you waste, others get better and the gap is created.

One of the important things is to be sure of the decision you take. If you take that decision half-heartedly, then you will not be able to focus on it solely. You will still be considering one or the other options.

You need to be 100% sure of the decision.

Make up your mind for it.

And then commit yourselves to it!

Tracking your progress

If you need a self-check on yourselves, to see if you are really dedicated to your goal, you can track the number of hours you commit. You can maintain a simple excel file or a google sheet to log on the hours at the end of the day.

Make a habit of logging in the number of hours of the previous day at some point the next day.

Seeing those zeroes for a few days will make you realize the reality.

Conclusion

All things said, here’s what you should take from this article:

1. Only collect a sufficient amount of information. Once you reach the cutoff limit, don’t search for more information, though it is ubiquitous, it’ll never stop.
2. Make a decision. Your decision. Justify yourselves. Not to anyone else.
3. Make the jump. Commit 100%, not 90%.
4. You can track your progress by tracking your time.

Share this philosophy with others, your batchmates, friends, and fellow students. After all, sharing is caring.

If you are a professional and have some comments on the above philosophy, I would certainly love to know them.