Looking for a job? Understanding how you make career decisions can help

If you’re getting ready to leave school or university and are trying to figure out your future career, you may well have been given the advice to start with some self-exploration. This means thinking about what you are like as a person and what you want from a job.

After this, you can identify a short list of possible options, research them in depth, and make a rational choice to pursue the one that best meets your needs. Once you have made a decision, then you can start applying for jobs.

But in my personal and professional experience as a career coach and researcher, this traditional approach to career choice is rarely how it works in practice. This is a normative model, meaning it shows us how decisions ought to be made and assumes that we are all completely logical, rational decision-makers.

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In practice, we know that people rarely make decisions logically and rationally, particularly when it comes to complex and significant decisions such as choosing a career path.

And while normative models can, in theory, help us to make better decisions, we know that normative models are only useful in practice if they are somewhat aligned with people’s natural instincts.

Figuring it out

I interviewed 40 recent graduates who are currently working. I asked them to think back to a time when they had no clue what they wanted to do. They talked me through how they went from having no idea at all about their future path to their current employment.

The graduates had studied different subjects and were now working in a wide range of positions and industries, but their career decision-making stories followed a surprisingly similar trajectory. Rather than considering what range of jobs might suit them, they started with a single appealing career idea.

Considering one occupation at a time reduces the amount of brain power required: it’s much easier to decide yes or no to a single option than to compare the pros and cons of a handful.

This approach also helps to allay career anxiety, as it allows people to do some fairly in-depth research before they commit. It downplays the significance of the first job they take, so they feel that it doesn’t really matter if they get it wrong and don’t enjoy the job after working there a while.

If this analysis suggested that the job seemed suitable enough, they would next do some in-depth research, often by actually applying for jobs. If not, they would go back and find another occupation to consider.

Through the application process they would learn more about the culture and the people within the sector and they would get some external feedback on whether their skills were a good match for the job (in the form of job offer or a rejection, for example).

Summaya, one of the graduates I spoke to, is now a recruitment consultant. “I studied psychology at university … I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to go into psychology as a career, but I quite liked the idea of understanding people,” she said.

She explained that she decided to look into careers in HR, “because it’s quite well paid and obviously it’s not really psychology, but there are sort of hints of psychology within it”. Summaya found that she could get a job in recruitment with no need for additional qualifications beyond her degree. She said:

The moment I decided was probably when I applied to my current company, and I had my first interview with them and they explained the job to me. Before that point, I had no idea really … I think, at that moment where I kind of understood, and I was like, oh, I think I’d actually really like doing this job.

Bound by experience

This process – considering one career option at a time and using the application process as a way to find out more – capitalises on a gut instinct to identify one occupation from thousands, but relies on rational logic to make a final choice. The process of introspection takes place within the much easier, bounded context of one particular occupation. This helps make the whole process of choosing a career less demanding.

This approach has a couple of key limitations. First, if you’re young, your available options are constrained by your experiences. While some students might have been introduced to a wide range of career ideas, others, because their life experiences have been more limited, have a much narrower pool of options to choose from.

And while the apply-and-decide approach makes some logical sense, in practice it can lead to graduates devolving the responsibility of their career choice to recruiters.

Understanding this process can help young people make better career choices. It might prompt you to get more experience in the workplace, to broaden your horizons and to develop a realistic idea of different roles. It might help you to take a bit more ownership of the decision. Applying for a job may be a good way to find out more, but leaving the choice in the hands of the recruiters is risky.

We can downplay the significance of a first job. This generation of young people are going to be working for a long time. There’s no harm in trying a few things out before you make a longer-term commitment.

Julia Yates does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.