What Color Is Your Parachute?

17. Production Occupations

18. Transportation and Material-Moving Occupations

19. Handlers, Equipment Cleaners, Helpers, and Laborers

• Next, you want to look at what your friends suggested about your interests or special knowledges: what fields or careers came to their minds? It will help you to know that most of the job families above can be classified under four broad headings: Agriculture, Manufacturing, Information Industries, and Service Industries. Which of these four do your friends’ suggestions predominantly point to? Which of these four grabs you?

• The next question you want to ask yourself is: job-titles and career-fields can be broken down further, according to whether you like to work primarily with people or primarily with information/data or primarily with things.

Let’s take the field of agriculture as an example. Within this field, you could be driving tractors or other farm machinery—and thus work primarily with things; or you could be gathering statistics about crop growth for some state agency—and thus work primarily with information/data; or you could be teaching agriculture in a college classroom—and thus work primarily with people and ideas. Almost all fields as well as career families offer you these three choices, though of course many jobs combine two of the three in some intricate way.

Still, you do want to tell yourself what your preference is, and what you primarily want to work with. Otherwise, your job-hunt or career-change is going to leave you very frustrated at the end. In this matter, it is often your favorite skill that will give you the clue. If it doesn’t, then go back and look at the whole Skills petal, on your Flower Diagram. What do you think? Are your favorite skills weighted more toward working with people, or toward working with information/data, or toward working with things?

And, no matter what that petal suggests, which of the three do you absolutely prefer, in your heart of hearts?

Just remember what you are trying to do here, in finding a name for your flower. What you call it—”name of Flower,” “name of a field based on your favorite subjects,” “the name of your new career,” or whatever—doesn’t matter. You are trying to find the names of careers or jobs that would give you a chance to use your skills in the most effective way.

Just make sure that you get the names of at least two careers, or jobs, that you think you could be happy doing. Never, ever, put all your eggs in one basket. The secret of surviving out there in the jungle is having alternatives.

Be careful. Be thorough. Be persistent. This is your life you’re working on, and your future. Make it glorious. Whatever it takes, find out the name of your ideal career, your ideal occupation, your ideal job—or jobs.

Informational Interviewing, Step 2: FINDING WHAT KINDS OF ORGANIZATIONS HAVE SUCH JOBS

Before you think of individual places where you might like to work, it is necessary to stop and think of all the kinds of places where one might get hired.

Let’s take an example. Suppose in your new career you want to be a teacher. You must then ask yourself: what kinds of places hire teachers? You might answer, “just schools”—and finding that schools in your geographical area have no openings, you might say, “Well, there are no jobs for people in this career.”

But wait a minute! There are countless other kinds of organizations and agencies out there, besides schools, that employ teachers. For example, corporate training and educational departments, workshop sponsors, foundations, private research firms, educational consultants, teachers’ associations, professional and trade societies, military bases, state and local councils on higher education, fire and police training academies, and so on and so forth.

“Kinds of places” also means places with different hiring options, besides full-time, such as:

• places that would employ you part-time (maybe you’ll end up deciding to hold down two or even three part-time jobs, which altogether would add up to one full-time job, in order to give yourself more variety);

• places that take temporary workers, on assignment for one project at a time;

• places that take consultants, one project at a time;

• places that operate primarily with volunteers, etc.;

• places that are nonprofit;

• places that are for-profit;

• and, don’t forget, places that you yourself could start up, should you decide to be your own boss (see chapter 10).

During this interviewing for information, you will not only talk to people who have a broad overview of the career or Flower Name that you have come up with. You will also want to talk, eventually, to actual workers in those kinds of organizations, who can tell you in more detail (than the overview-people can) exactly what the tasks are in the organizations you are intrigued by.

Informational Interviewing, Step 3: FINDING THE NAMES OF PARTICULAR PLACES

As you interview workers about their jobs or careers, they will probably innocently mention actual names of organizations that have such jobs—plus what’s good or bad about the place. This is important information for you. Jot it all down. Keep notes as though it were part of your religion.

But you will want to supplement what they have told you, by seeking out other people you can make the following little speech to: “I’m interested in this kind of organization, because I want to do this kind of job; do you know of particular places I might investigate, and if so, where are they located?” Use personal interviews, use LinkedIn, use the Yellow pages, use search engines, to try to find the answer(s) to that question.

Now when this name-gathering is all done, what do you have? Well, either you’ll have too few names of places to work, or you’ll end up with too much information—too many names of places that hire people in the career that interests you. There are ways of dealing with either of these eventualities. We’ll take this last scenario, first.

Cutting Down the Territory

To avoid ending up with the names of too many places, you will want to cut down the territory, so you are left with a manageable number of “targets” to research and visit.[43]

Let’s take an example. Suppose you discover that the career that interests you the most is welding. You want to be a welder. Well, that’s a beginning. You’ve cut the 23 million U.S. job-markets down to:

• I want to work in a place that hires welders.

But the territory is still too large. There might be thousands of places in the country, that use welders. You