When I was in college studying to be a chiropractor, I was not confident this was the best career path for me. So I reached out to my friend Mike, who is a psychiatrist, and he recommended studying occupational therapy. I had never heard of the field, so I went to discuss it with a career counselor at school, and he suggested that I take the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers Briggs tests. The tests were not exams that you had to prepare for or be scared of. There were a lot of questions about your likes and dislikes. They asked me questions like: "Do you prefer working indoors or outdoors?” or “If you found $20 on the floor, would you A. keep it, B. look for the owner, C. turn it in to lost and found?” The results coincidentally listed occupational therapy as the job best suited for me. The program allowed me to research the top one hundred jobs that match my personality, interests, and ambitions, as well as read the descriptions of each job, and to learn about the course of study, compensation ranges, demand, and future outlook for employment. It's loaded with information from the U.S. Department of Labor. These few hours of testing changed the course of my college education and my life.
If you're not sure which route to go, take some career assessment tests such as the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers Briggs personality test. These tests will provide you with a career assessment that gives you insight and direction into jobs that would suit you and you would enjoy most. Careers such as solar panel installer, wind turbine technician, engineer, plumber, therapist, physician, scientist, or any other fields that you'd like and that are in demand, will allow you to generate income at a faster rate.
The information I received from these tests gave me confidence that I was studying something I would enjoy. It increased my drive because I now had a clearer idea of what I needed to study to achieve what I wanted.
As an investment strategy, don't study fields or train for careers that have limited demand, even if you have a passion for them, otherwise you will go into debt and won't have a way to pay back the money. Not doing their market research is the top reason why people end up with excessive amounts of student debt that they cannot pay back. Ending up in a saturated field will put you in competition with multiple candidates for the same job, which will drive down the wages for those positions. We would not be having a student debt crisis if people took the time to research which fields were in demand and studied in those fields. This is evident in the high numbers of skilled science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workers that companies have to import every year to fill all the job openings. Currently, the number of foreign STEM workers in the US is around 23 million workers. Look at some employment websites, and see what jobs are actually paying. This will also help you do a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not it's worth taking on a certain amount of debt or not.
Around 2010, the field of respiratory therapy became popular because of the excellent pay, $25 to $35 an hour, and the short amount of time needed in school, just over a year. I was working at a respiratory hospital, and I can remember the sudden influx of respiratory therapy students volunteering there to get experience so they could get employed. There was one particularly friendly volunteer who explained to me that he had a job delivering pizzas to pay the bills and that he had been a full-time volunteer for over a year at our hospital waiting for a position to open up so he could get a paying job in the field. Luckily he eventually got a post, but many of the candidates simply gave up as they needed to start paying back their $50,000 school loan debt and start earning a living. Don't choose fields of study because they are easy to get into, look at the demand first.
As a compromise, study something marketable; start earning income and make your passion your hobby with the potential to grow into a primary business in the future, as you develop the skills and the markets change.
Automation is another consideration to keep in mind when picking a subject to study. In 2017, ninety percent of the jobs done by humans could be done by robots, including jobs like doctors, nurses, and chefs. As the majority of the world population is getting older, robots will be a fact of life for everyone. Robots will not be able to complete all jobs, so think about future needs in that labor market as well when considering an occupation.
Something else to keep in mind is that not everyone is meant to work in a trade or even to pursue higher education. These are good ways to get started if you are not sure about what you want and in which direction you would like to go. Sometimes you start studying a certain field, and then you figure it's something you don't have a passion for or would like to work in. So it's a catalyst to pursue something else that you do have a passion for. Some of the most successful and innovative people on the planet don’t fit into categories, because they are thinking outside the box. This can be a very valuable asset, which should not go unrecognized, but instead supported. The biggest clustering of innovative people on the planet live in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. That is where the highest concentration of discoveries and game-changing enterprises get started. If you have creative talents; feed, practice, and hone those talents the same way any professional would. For example, if you are a musician, practice. If you paint; create as many as you can. If you design computer applications; keep on designing.
Whatever you do, use deliberate practice. Psychologists describe deliberate practice as a way to push your skillset as much as possible. Basketball legend Larry Bird used to practice shooting thousands of times every morning and would show up hours before team workouts and games so he could practice on his own. Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, and Magic Johnson were all notoriously obsessed with exercising and training more than twelve hours a day to be the greatest of all time.
My neighbors are musicians, and they practice about once or twice a week and perform shows about once a month. They reminded me of The Beatles whose performances were not considered to be very good. That’s why they went to Hamburg, Germany, to find somewhere new to perform, because they were not having much success in England. Instead of playing the usual few nights a week, they sometimes played eight hours a day, anywhere and for anyone who would listen to them. They had to try harder, find new ways of playing, got better, gained self-confidence having to work the long hours.
Whatever you decide you would like to do, utilize deliberate practice to build up and master your knowledge and skill to be the best.
No comments:
Post a Comment