SEVEN RULES FOR CHOOSING OR CHANGING CAREERS
When you have to choose or change a career, here are seven rules to keep in mind:
Rule #1 about choosing or changing a career: go for any career that seems interesting or even fascinating to you. But first talk to people who are already doing that work, to find out if the career or job is as great as it seems at first impression. Ask them: what do you like best about this work? What do you like least about this work? And, how did you get into this work? This last question, which sounds like mere cheeky curiosity, actually can give you important job-hunting clues about how you could get into this line of work or career.
Rule #2 about choosing or changing a career: make sure that you preserve constancy as well as change, during this transition. In other words, don’t change everything. Remember the words of Archimedes with his long lever,[37] loosely paraphrased as: Give me a fulcrum and a place to stand, and with a lever I will move the Earth. You need a place to stand, when you move your life around, and that place is provided by the things that stay constant about you: your transferable skills, your values, your character, your faith.
We can illustrate this principle about maintaining some constancy with the simple diagram of creative career change that follows. Let us say you are an accountant, in the television industry, and you want to become a reporter, covering medicine. You can, of course, try to change everything in one big leap (labeled the difficult path in this diagram), but that’s all change and no constancy. To preserve some constancy, you can first change just your job-title and only later your field. Or you can first change just your field, and only later your job-title (two steps). This two-step plan for career-change preserves some constancy at every turn, some continuity with the past, and allows you to always claim some past experience and expertise, each time you make a move.
THREE TYPES OF CAREER-CHANGE, VISUALIZED 
Rule #3 about choosing or changing a career: you do better to start with yourself and what you want, rather than with the job-market, and what’s “hot.” The difference is “enthusiasm” or “passion.”
Rule #4 about choosing or changing a career: the best work, the best career, for you is going to be one that uses: your favorite transferable skills, in your favorite subjects, fields, or special knowledges, in a job that offers you your preferred people-environments, your preferred working conditions, with your preferred salary or other rewards, working toward your preferred goals and values. This requires thorough self-inventory. Detailed instructions are to be found in chapter 13.
Rule #5 about choosing or changing a career: the more time you give to the choosing, the better your choice is going to be. There is a penalty for seeking “quick and dirty” fixes.
Rule #6 about choosing or changing a career: if you are a young adult, you don’t have to get it right, the first time; it’s okay to make a mistake, in your choice. You’ll have time to correct it, down the road. Most of us have three to five careers during our lifetime, and heaven only knows how many jobs.
Rule #7 about choosing or changing a career: this should be fun, as much fun as possible. The more fun you’re having, the more you can be sure you’re doing it right.
This builds upon a little-known truth in career-counseling or job-hunting: “The clearer your vision of what you seek, the closer you are to finding it. For, what you are seeking is also seeking you.” Sounds kooky, but I’ve seen it happen too many times, not to believe it. Okay, so how do you make your vision clearer?
Take a large piece of white paper, with some colored pencils or pens, and draw a picture of your ideal life: where you live, who’s with you, what you do, what your dwelling looks like, what your ideal vacation looks like, etc. Don’t let reality get in the way. Pretend a magic wand has been waved over your life, and it gives you everything you think your ideal life would be.
Now, of course you’re going to tell me you can’t draw. Okay, then make symbols for things, or create little “doodads” or symbols, with labels—anything so that you can see all together on one page your vision of your ideal life—however haltingly expressed.
The power of this exercise is sometimes amazing. Reason? By avoiding words and using pictures or symbols as much as possible, it bypasses the left side of the brain (“the safekeeping self,” as George Prince calls it) and speaks directly to the right side of your brain (“the experimental self”), whose job it is to engineer change.
Oh, and apropos of Rule #7, this exercise is fun!
This done, let’s look at the Internet for further clues. In my opinion, the single most useful website with regard to careers is Susan Joyce’s www.job- hunt.org; the volume of information on her site is stunning. The second most useful would be business sites that you can uncover by typing “careers” into a search engine like Google. One that will turn up, if you do this, is CNNMoney’s (http://money.cnn.com). This site is home to CNN, Money magazine, and Fortune. The site has a fascinating article, about Warren Farrell’s research on salaries and careers, at http://tinyurl.com/qcys5. It’s called “Where Women’s Pay Trumps Men’s,” and it is chock-full of brilliant ideas about how to make a career choice, where money is the issue. It is based on Warren’s blockbuster book (my opinion): Why Men Earn More. Warren is a brilliant, meticulous, highly ethical researcher, but his book is more news than it is just another research tome. If I had my way, I would give this book to every female career-chooser or career-changer on the planet.
I suppose somewhere along the way you want lists of “hot jobs” or such. Try CareerCast.com’s list of “Best Jobs for 2011,” at http://tinyurl.com/3atala3.
Well, these may be “Best Jobs” but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the
