So far in this course, we have considered external and internal factors that may be affecting your decision making as well as mindsets that may be guiding you as you seek to achieve your goals. I hope that this material and the exercises have given you a better sense of who you are. This week, we are going to turn our attention to practical steps you can take to begin thinking about new goals that are right for you. I'd like to start with how to best frame this exploration. In 2015, I attended a conference of career development professionals from small liberal arts colleges. The two keynote speakers were from Ideo, a globally recognized design consulting firm known for their use of a problem solving rubric called design thinking. Ideo has used this technique to address issues as broad ranging, as fresh water delivery in Nairobi, enhancing the experience of students at New York University, Wagner School of Public Service, and financial literacy education for low income teenagers in the U.S. The basic framework holds that innovation and human centered design happens at the intersection of desirability, what people want, feasibility, what is technically possible, and viability, what there is a market for. The two Ideo staff members walked us, conference attendees, through the process of applying this tool to how our offices delivered career services to students. However, having had some prior familiarity with their rubric, I found myself writing down thoughts and using it as a model for individual career development. I then began researching the origins of the idea, how the framework varied, and how it had been applied in various contexts over time. I thought I had a lot to offer the field of career development. While I have worked with clients in all stages of their careers, I am at this time the director of a career center at a liberal arts college. Despite there being no clear roadmaps in virtually any field for career success in today's dynamic economy, the college students we work with tend to approach their job searches like their college search process, looking for applications to fill out in the hopes that someone will accept them. But why not encourage students to think of their confusion about their future as a life design challenge? Framing it this way, their plans after graduation would lie at the intersection of what they are interested in doing, desirability what they have the skills to accomplish, feasibility, and what market might exist for those interest and skills, viability. The way I see it, the single greatest challenge to finding fulfilling, rewarding work is the complexity of it. But the field of design rebels and wicked problems first defined by mathematician and designer, Horst Rittel, as a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing. Rittel offered 10 properties of wicked problems which I have reconceptualized as five core problems facing the specific wicked problem of finding meaningful work. One, every search will be unique to one's own time and place, situational context, and the career script one has developed from the myriad influences, conscious or not, affecting one's decision making. Two, the job market is in constant flux, including what positions are available, and the skills and experiences they require. Three, there are no perfect solutions, but there are better and worse choices. Four, there are always options beyond what one sees. And five, there are always factors beyond one's vision and control. The bottom line is scientific reasoning will not help you navigate your career, though it may be a skill that will come in handy in a number of professions. But applying design thinking to the career development process can help provide a rubric to help you determine what circumstances might lead to professional fulfillment, what aspects of your background might be influencing your decision making and provide a roadmap for triangulating what you want, what you bring to the table, and where a market exists for you. A core component of design thinking is the use of abductive logic, where you're inferring possible best outcomes from experience. Abductive logic is best understood in contrast with other types of logic, with which are likely more familiar. Deductive logic, for example, is based on pre-existing models or theories, applied to career decisions it might look like this. Deductive; my parents are both doctors, so I should be a doctor. Your model for a successful career is medicine, so you decide to pursue that. In contrast, traditional career theory is based on analytical thinking, an inductive logic. If you've ever taken a career assessment test, chances are you were asked some combination of your interests, values and skills. Perhaps you were asked to weigh in on the likelihood of pursuing various career paths. If it was a more general personality instrument, you may've been asked about how you go about your daily life for your preferences, for things like scheduling plans in advance, or brainstorming ideas and groups. Based on your answers, you are likely given a choice of potential career paths, perhaps even linked to suggested college majors. Problem solved. So for example, inductive, I am good at science and like helping people, so I should become a doctor. But let's recall my brother's experience with such assessments. There is a reason he is not a lumberjack. These traditional methods of sorting workers into roles ignore social context. Why don't we take these things into account? Contextual factors are broad multi-dimensional and affect people in different ways and to different extents and are notoriously tricky to unpack from one subconscious mind. Trying to figure out what may be influencing your career decision making is hard, and people do not like things that are hard. It is much easier to take a test than to reflect in-depth on the myriad familial, cultural, socio-economic, religious, I could keep going here, factors that might be affecting your thinking. But this is what this course is for, to help you pay better attention to your social context, and to understand how they are affecting your decision making, probably far more than you think. One of the most common questions I get from college students and their parents, is how do I know what is out there? The fact is that question has never been harder to answer. As a result, people go looking for answers based on reliability rather than validity. What do I mean by that? In research per lot, reliability refers to the ability to replicate results consistently and predictably. Validity refers to whether an outcome is true, that is whether it actually reflects what is really happening. When it comes to career development, people tend to focus their decision making on careers that they feel they already know something about, or has some other logical tie in with your experience. Students commonly ask, what can I do with a major in X? Since I work with liberal arts students, those answers are seemingly infinite. When I was asked recently to compile a list of careers pursued by recent graduates in biology from our institution, the outcomes included healthcare, research, and teaching, as one might expect. But also consulting, law, investment banking, publishing, and many others, not terribly useful in terms of narrowing options. But that was the point, to demonstrate that one need not feel constrained by one field, one's field of study. But often people want to be constrained, at least in the sense that they want to feel that they have a discrete list of options from which to choose. They have choice paralysis, and just want to know if they should buy strawberry, jam, or orange marmalade. What happens on the ground, is that people tend to choose careers that are a match for the expectations of those around them. This is why you have students who believe law or medicine are their only choices. I've also had unhappy PhD candidates tell me that they chose their path because their undergraduate advisers had told them that they would make a good medievalist, assuming with the ego of the chosen that any other top student in their discipline would of course want to follow in their footsteps. But what we are really talking about here, is a reliability bias applied to career decision making. Even at first glance, it should be clear that the first two examples of career choice methods are at best incomplete. Yet I know, from years of working as a career counselor, that people, when faced with overwhelming choices and shortage of time, such as the immediate or impending need to receive a paycheck, people will use analytical thinking much more often than engage in the deep self-analysis and career exploration necessary to fully take advantage of the benefits of abductive logic. But let's take a look at another response to our question that uses abductive logic, used in design thinking. Abductive, I like science and helping people, so I am going to take time to learn more about every possible career path that could combine those two things. I am going to talk to as many people as possible who are working in those fields, and narrow my options based on those conversations and my research. I will explore internships, job shadow placements, and other experiential learning opportunities to field test my options before committing to further education. One of the brilliant things about this answer that might not be immediately apparent, is that this is the answer most likely to resonate with medical schools. They want to know that you don't just want to become a doctor to please your parents, or because people will look up to you. If you're going to survive medical school, both academically and psychologically, you need to be intrinsically motivated to achieve that goal. That motivation needs to come from a place within you, not just outside you. It's not that it's a bad thing to want to do something that will benefit your family, or your community. That's often a big part of the decision making process and it should be. But if we look again at these answers, you'll see that they're also not mutually exclusive. You could say all of them and still have a consistent narrative. But it's that last piece that will convince others to give you your shot, and will give you the long term motivation you need to succeed.
