I am an adult developmental psychologist by training and a career counselor by trade, currently the Director of the Gordon Career Center at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In this course, I draw from my decades of experience as well as research from the fields of psychology, organizational behavior, and sociology to help you understand best practices for making career decisions. This content will help you develop the tools you need to make the right choices for you, from deciding an area of study to exploring potential lines of work to pursue—and knowing when to pivot at any time in your career.
The Rule of Three
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來自 Wesleyan University 的課程
Career Decisions: From Insight to Impact
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This week we'll use a design thinking framework to learn how to broaden your exploration for possible working identities. You will also implement practical steps for making professional connections and learning more about specific fields of interest. Finally, you will complete a capstone project that pulls together all the concepts from the course and help you make your case for how you can make an impact on the world.
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Sharon Belden CastonguayDirector, Gordon Career Center
This course is about trying to be mindful of the influences that may be affecting
you so that you can make choices that are, if not free of subconscious bias,
are made largely by influences of which you are consciously aware.
But now that we have rooted out of our subconscious some of those influences
affecting our thinking, what do we do next?
How do we reconcile our choice paralysis and the need to expand our options
with the need to get started on a job or internship search?
Today we're going to turn our attention to some practical ways you can begin to learn
about options that may be a good fit for you.
I think the lessons to be learned here can be applied regardless of where you are in
your decision making process.
If you have figured out exactly what you want to do next,
this segment will help you learn more about the world you intend to enter,
as well as how to build a professional network within it.
If you're starting from scratch,
this segment will help give you a road map to follow as you try to explore your
options, to diverge before you converge without becoming overwhelmed.
I'd like to walk you through an exercise that I've named the rule of three.
To illustrate, I'm going to use the example of a fictional recent college
graduate named Tamara Bello.
Tamara Bello has completed one internship in online marketing for
a Fortune 500 company.
But now she wants to work somewhere that is on the cutting edge of using online
social networking as a means to grow a business.
But she's not sure if she wants to stay in marketing,
make use of her skills in data analysis, or try something else entirely.
So she's decided that what's most important to her now is to focus on her
interest in specific organizations rather than what she'll do for them.
Ideally, she'd like to be in Boston, but she's open to other cities as well.
Other things to know about her is that she's a history major and
data sciences minor whose hobbies include playing bass guitar and personal fitness.
It is very easy to become overwhelmed about all the moving pieces involved in
a search for a job or even an internship.
To help organize her thinking as well as her action steps, Tamara
is going to follow the rule of three to learn more about possible options.
She is going to regularly read three news sources that she genuinely enjoys.
From those she will identify three dream employers.
She will identify three people within each employer and
ask at least three questions of each of those people.
Tamara is interested in smaller pre-IPO companies that have a reputation for
innovation.
For her news sources she chooses first, Fast Company Magazine.
This is a business magazine that focuses on innovation in not just the private
sector but also in nonprofits, NGOs, and the public sector.
While it's available online, she likes to get the hard copy version because she's
more likely, just through serendipity,
to stumble across articles about organizations she's never heard of.
She also reads the Wall Street Journal, and in particular,
their Top 50 startups annual issue and related articles.
She also enjoys Harvard Business Review, as well as its podcast, but
tries especially to always follow Dory Clark's content,
as she has interesting advice about marketing as well as personal branding.
As Tamara is reading,
she keeps a list of organizations she wants to learn more about.
Three of her top picks are Patreon,
a San Francisco-based crowdsourcing platform for performing artists.
Bumble, a feminist dating app.
And Honor, an app that connects caregivers to seniors needing in-home care.
She starts researching these organizations online and takes notes on what she finds.
She also tells people in her life, including friends, family,
and professors about her interests.
She learns from a news article that one of Patreon's clients is an alumna of her
college and is scheduled to be on campus for an event.
She makes a note to attend in the hopes of meeting her.
In the meantime, a high school classmate tells Tamara that her college roommate
interned at Bumble last summer and she offers to connect them.
When she goes home for the holidays, she learns from her uncle that
her grandmother's home health aide found them through Honor.
She has a conversation with her friend's roommate who was very enthusiastic
about Bumble.
She gives Tamara the name of both the human resources representative
she worked with when she was hired and of her former supervisor.
Tamara begins with a supervisor,
writing a brief email requesting an informational interview.
Note here that she's not asking specifically about openings within
the company.
But is making it clear that she wants to learn more about them.
Through her research on LinkedIn,
Tamara finds out that there are two alums of her university working at Patreon.
She reaches out to both of them, saying that her interest in their company was
piqued by both the Coverage and Fast Company, and the enthusiastic
recommendation given by their client when Tamara met her on campus.
Using the same strategy she did with Bumble,
she does not ask about opportunities within the company, but rather for
the opportunity to meet them, and learn more about their experiences.
In the mean time, Tamara continues to read about different organizations and
keeps up the strategy of when she speaks with people within them.
She asks questions like, what type of skills and
experiences do you need in your department?
What is the best way to stay on top of what is happening in this industry?
If I'm interested in an organization like this one, where else should I be looking?
Are there any events I could attend to meet more people in the field?
Do you have any recommendations of other people with whom I should speak?
Note that her focus here is on learning as much as possible about where and how she
might work for different organizations, not just on asking whether openings exist.
She recognizes that asking someone for a job tends to put people on the spot, and
can end conversations prematurely.
She also isn't even sure what she wants to do yet, and so
is genuinely trying to use this process to help her expand her possible options.
By going about it in a systematic way, she's increasing her odds that she will
not only refine her goals but land a position purely through serendipity.
I define serendipity in this context as where luck and hard work converge.
And there is still going to need to be an element of luck in this process.
One of the most popular modern career theories,
one that takes into account social context, is chaos theory.
Chaos theory has a lot in common with how design thinking frames the problem.
It encourages continuous flexible planning over set long term plans.
Openness to change and new things.
Seeing decisions as provisional.
Measured risk taking and seeing mistakes as experiments.
And seeing and appreciating the role of chance in one's success.
Chaos theory stresses the need for luck readiness.
An expression I love, because I see it as just another way of saying serendipity.
Chaos theory stresses the importance of people taking ownership of their careers.
In the sense that one takes control, when possible, but allows for contingency.
You must also recognize patterns of influence, both external and
internal on your thinking and actions.
As well as to understand what matters most in your life and how your personal values
and valued relationships come to bear on your decision making.
These have all been primary themes of this course.
But it's also important to be willing to live with uncertainty, and
recognize that change will come and that it's best to be ready for it.
So what happens to Tamara?
Does she except a job at Patreon, at Bumble?
Nope, it's really not that easy.
She ends up researching nearly 50 organizations and
speaks with ten people to learn more.
What she ends up discovering about herself throughout the process is that she didn't
want to work for a startup after all, and that she was a better fit for
a more structured corporate environment.
She found herself quite excited about the opportunities available to her given her
background in data analytics.
In the end she accepts a position with Epsilon,
a Boston area marketing analytics company.
A job she finds out about through an alumnus of her university in
an area alumni event hosted by her school.
After accepting the position, the next thing she does is reach out to every
person she spoke with during her search process, letting them know of her success.
She expresses the hope that they can stay in touch,
recognizing the importance of keeping up her professional relationships over time.
What I hope you take away from today is that the process of refining your goals is
complex, but it can be done.
Remember that you're not making a decision for the rest of your life,
you're choosing the next step, the next iteration of your career.
