You’re probably searching for jobs backward

Ask the important questions first

Job-seekers and job-havers who are thinking about their next career step, consider this:

1. As a child, you’re asked to imagine what you want to be. This gets you dreaming about something you don’t understand
2. When you’re nearing adulthood, you’re told to start thinking about which jobs you want. This gets you planning with little information
3. Once you start working, you’re told to focus on how to get to the next level. This traps you in the direction that you started in without necessarily having the full picture

The philosophy behind this brand of thinking assumes that you can build a decent career plan from an early age, tailor your education and your activities in service of that plan, and follow through with it over the course of years and decades until you’ve finally made your carefully-built career plan into a reality.

This is a fairy tale.

Photo by Дмитрий Хрусталев-Григорьев on Unsplash

Try this: ask a few people (who have been working for a decade or more) how well their actual career path matched the vision they had in their teenage years. Or their plans in their early 20s. Or 30s. Chances are, you’ll hear one of two stories.

1. The more honest folks will tell you the pivots, dead ends, and big leaps they went through
2. The other ones might spin a narrative about how each step of their journey contributed to where they are today and make it sound like a smoother process than it likely was

Either way, there is an underlying truth that there is usually a gap between planning and reality, and there isn’t enough conversation about how to deal with that.

Photo by Andreas Kind on Unsplash

I’m not telling you to give up on your dreams as you try to build the life you want. But here are some actionable tips on how to better search for that next (or first) job:

Reverse your process for finding a job: Too many people start by thinking about the job that sounds the most attractive, and then start asking questions too late about “which of these jobs suits me the best?” I recently tweeted about not getting attached to job titles, which resonated with a good number of people. I say ignore the titles altogether at first, and instead focus on what you want to be doing day to day, what you want your environment to look like while you’re working, what you want to be learning, anything BUT the title. You might find some interesting avenues that you weren’t aware of before.

Broaden your search. Whether it’s your first job or you’re already working, you might get a bit of tunnel vision on one job because it’s what you know, and you start putting it on a pedestal, even thinking of it as a “dream job” (If you start thinking about a job as a “calling,” please give this a read). Realize that your target job is just your current direction. Broaden your search to tangential roles or different industries.

Treat every job as an experiment to learn about yourself: A popular bit of advice is that each job should let you earn, learn, or both. I would suggest that you should treat each job as a way to test the waters. How well does this way of living and working fit what you want? Does this bring you in the direction you were hoping? If not, is that okay? Doing this has the side effect of forcing you to you maintain a healthy level of self-awareness so that you can avoid getting into a rut.

Have you used one of these strategies, or have found other unconventional methods that worked for you? Are you struggling with a different problem thinking about your next career move? Do let me know!

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