What Should I Do If I Don’t Know What Career I Want?

If you don’t know what career you want…Congratulations. You may be one of the lucky ones. Your future is still wide open.

There is an old saying: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

This sounds wonderfully philosophical. It is also terrible advice to give a taxi driver.

“Where to, sir?”

“I don’t know.”

“No problem. I know exactly how to get there.”

And off you go.

Perhaps choosing a career at eighteen sometimes feels a little like that.

We ask a young person who may still be deciding what to have for lunch: “What do you want to do for the rest of your life?”

And then we wait for a serious answer.

Doctor. Lawyer. Architect. Entrepreneur. Chef. Marketing executive.

Very good.

But what if the answer is: “I don’t know.”

That may actually be one of the more sensible answers.
 

How are you supposed to know?

Think about it.

• How does an eighteen-year-old know whether she would enjoy marketing if she has never marketed anything?
• How does someone know he wants to become an entrepreneur if he has never tried convincing a customer to part with actual money?
• How does a student know she would enjoy hospitality if the most difficult guest she has ever dealt with is her younger brother?

We sometimes behave as though somewhere inside every young person is a fully formed accountant, architect, hotelier, entrepreneur or investment banker waiting to be discovered.

Sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes there is just an eighteen-year-old saying: “Could I try a few things first?”

That sounds reasonable to me.
 

Your future job may not have been invented yet

There is another problem with asking young people to choose their lifelong careers. Some of the jobs they will eventually have may not exist yet.

Imagine asking a young person thirty years ago: “Have you considered becoming a social media manager?”

“A what?”

“Or perhaps an app developer?”

“Developing what?”

“How about a cybersecurity analyst?”

“Cyber what?”

Today we might ask a student whether she wants to become an AI engineer, a data scientist or a content creator.

Thirty years from now, perhaps parents will be asking: “Have you considered becoming a Manager of Robots?” Or an Algorithm Manager? Perhaps a Chief Human Judgment Officer?

I rather like that last one. Its job description might read: Required whenever the artificial intelligence is absolutely certain and everybody else is nervous.

There may be AI Hallucination Inspectors, whose job is to determine whether the machine knows what it is talking about.

There could be Robot Relationship Managers, resolving disagreements between employees and their machines.

Human Resources may eventually need a new department: Non-Human Resources.

And somewhere in the organization, I hope there will always be a Director of Unintended Consequences. That person will never run out of work.

The point is not that these particular jobs will exist. The point is that we don’t know.

And neither does the eighteen-year-old whom we are asking to choose a career for the next forty years.
 

Perhaps you are not choosing a destination

Maybe this is where we make the question unnecessarily frightening.

“What career do you want?” sounds like: Choose now. This is your life. No exchanges. No refunds.

But careers seldom work that way.

People change industries.

Accountants become entrepreneurs. Engineers become executives. Teachers become administrators. Employees start businesses. Businesspeople become teachers.

• Sometimes the career changes because we planned it.
• Sometimes because somebody saw something in us that we had not seen in ourselves.
• Sometimes an opportunity appears.
• Sometimes a company disappears.
• Sometimes technology changes everything.

And occasionally life simply says: “Interesting plan. I have another idea.”

Perhaps at eighteen you are not choosing your final destination. You are choosing your next road.

That is considerably less frightening.
 

So, what should you do if you don’t know?

Try things.

College gives you a remarkable opportunity to conduct experiments on a very interesting subject: yourself.

• Take a subject you know little about.
• Join an organization.
• Help organize an event.
• Enter a competition.
• Try selling something.
• Volunteer.
• Work on a real project.
• Talk to an entrepreneur.
• Spend time with an architect.

Ask a chef what the job is really like when everybody else is celebrating Christmas and the restaurant is full.

Ask a business executive how much of the job is actually making brilliant strategic decisions and how much is sitting in meetings wondering why the brilliant strategic decision isn’t working.

Take an internship.

• Then pay attention to yourself.
• What kind of problems make you curious?
• What work makes time disappear?
• What kind of people do you enjoy working with?

Do you like persuading people? Building things? Analyzing numbers? Creating things? Organizing chaos? Helping people? Solving problems nobody else wants to touch?

And just as importantly: What do you dislike?

That is useful information too.

A student may spend six weeks in an internship and conclude: “I never want to do this again.”

Excellent.

Six weeks is considerably cheaper than discovering the same thing after six years. A bad internship can sometimes be very good career advice.
 

Don’t wait for your passion to descend from the heavens

Young people are often told: “Follow your passion.”

Wonderful advice – if you happen to know what your passion is. But what if you don’t? Should you sit quietly until passion arrives?

Perhaps there is another way.

Do something. Then notice whether it interests you.

Do a little more. See whether you become good at it.

Meet people who are better at it than you are. Discover whether becoming better makes you want to continue.

Sometimes passion comes first. But sometimes competence comes first, and passion follows.

We often enjoy doing things we gradually discover we can do well.
 

You are also allowed to change your mind

This may be one of the most important things an eighteen-year-old should hear.

• Changing direction does not necessarily mean the first direction was a mistake.
• The first road may have taught you something you needed in order to recognize the second.
• You may study finance and discover that what really fascinates you is technology.
• You may study hospitality and discover that you love entrepreneurship.
• You may begin in marketing and discover that your real strength is analytics.
• You may become an accountant and eventually discover that what you really enjoy is teaching young accountants.
• Nothing has necessarily been wasted.
• Careers accumulate.
• Skills travel with us.
• Experiences connect in ways that are difficult to see while they are happening.

I certainly did not know where my own road would lead

Looking back at my own life, I could make my career sound wonderfully planned.

That would be a very nice story. It would also be fiction.

One job led to another. One assignment created another opportunity. People entered my life. Circumstances changed. I discovered things I could do reasonably well and quite a few things I could not.

• There were successes.
• There were mistakes.
• There were surprises.

Lots of surprises.

Eventually, after spending much of my career in business and management, I found myself in education—and much later, president of a college.

If someone had shown that career path to me when I was eighteen and said: “This is the plan.”

I suspect I would have looked at it for a while and asked: “Are you sure you have the right Salipsip?”

And perhaps that is why I am not terribly worried when a young person tells me: “I don’t know what I want to become.”

Good. There is still a great deal to discover.
 

Welcome to the adventure

If you already know exactly what career you want, wonderful. Start walking.

But if you don’t know, don’t panic. You may be lucky.

Your future is still wide open.

• Try things.
• Meet people.
• Take a few wrong turns.
• Discover what you are good at.
• Discover what you are terrible at.
• Find something you thought you would love and discover that you don’t.
• Find something you never imagined doing and discover that you do.

You do not need to know today exactly where the road will end.

But there is one thing I would not recommend. Don’t stand still waiting for a map. The map is probably outdated anyway.

• Start somewhere.
• Look around.
• Learn something about the world.
• Learn something about yourself.

And prepare for surprises.

Welcome to the adventure