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The shape of work is changing.
There used to be decades of clear career paths, ladders and tracks to climb. When you arrived at the best job, that was it – you would work there until you retired. Today, career paths are less clear than ever. Entry-level jobs are rapidly disappearing, the best way to increase your pay and experience is often to job hop, and having the skills to find work is becoming as important as knowing how to do the job.
At the heart of these are focused reflection skills, so students can examine their conceptions of work and create self-informed strategies to navigate future jobs. We need to equip Gen Z with the skills and mindsets to help them achieve rewarding careers in today’s dynamic workplace.
Encouraging play
Students have countless success stories presented to them where the reward is the destination. They learn that if you study hard, then work hard and make sacrifices, one day you’ll make it. We need to reframe the model of success in careers: when the journey is the reward, the career remains fulfilling even when the destination shifts.
Any process with a de-emphasized destination is fundamentally playful. For example, making music is playful – otherwise, conductors would orchestrate just a single crashing note. (That’s why we call it playing music.)
Play has become essential in today’s careers. For example, career advisors must help students reflect on what constitutes a satisfying day-to-day work life rather than simply a title or field. Here are some prompts to support this reflection.
- Have students reflect on which emotions they want to feel in their ideal job (like satisfaction or curiosity), then ask them where in their normal life those emotions usually crop up.
- Have students write down what kinds of people they want to work with. One common cause of burnout is a bad match with an individual’s manager or the company culture.
- Help students find the kinds of activities that help them get into the flow (where they can focus for hours on end), or those they find themselves thinking about when they don’t need to be.
- Give students opportunities for ideation in career development, without filtering or criticizing their ideas. Have them design potential career paths with a focus on exploring themes rather than destinations (“doing academic research” rather than ”becoming a professor”). Then, ask them to jot down what else they’re exploring (projects, volunteering, etc.). After this exercise, students and their advisors can assess the ideas and build action plans. But free ideation is crucial – especially for students who are feeling “stuck.”
“We need to reframe the model of success in careers: when the journey is the reward, the career remains fulfilling even when the destination shifts.”
Choosing the impact
People want impactful careers, yet so few examine what “impact” matters to them. Do they want to make something that affects a million people? Or do they want to save the lives of a dozen people? Do they want to make people smile? Or do they want to make people more secure?
People often slip into the default option of hunting for promotions, higher pay and more respect. While these are important resources, knowing how you want to use them is a massive advantage in career progression and satisfaction.
Career advisors are well positioned to help students identity their core motivators and develop a clearer answer to the question, “Why do you want that career?” An advisor can work through several questions with students to help them figure out what type of impact they want to make:
- Do you care more about helping a large number of people or deeply helping a few people?
- Does it matter how visible / public the impact is? Or would you prefer just the people you help knowing about it?
- Do you care more about enabling other people to succeed, or about building up your skills / achievements?
- Are there any examples of things you’ve experienced that you want more people to have access to? How about experiences you want to help others avoid?
- What about the world frustrates you? (This is often a great source of ideas, as often people get frustrated when they see a problem and can envision an “easy” solution with their skillset.)
Giving them an out
While helping students find the best place for them is important, it’s also important to be realistic. Not every job will be a good fit, and the days of staying in one job your whole life have passed. If you wait until things go wrong to take action, it’s easy to find yourself feeling overwhelmed, stuck or burnt out, unable to make a meaningful attempt for something better.
So, it’s important to think longer term when starting a new job. Here are a couple of ways career advisors can help students continue thinking about their career beyond their job search.
- Career advisors should recommend students set a calendar reminder 6-24 months into the future after beginning a new job, to seriously consider whether the job is working for them or whether they should plan to leave. (That means looking at other job postings and considering what their life would look like if they made a big change.) Then, if they decide to stay, they should reschedule the reminder.
- Advisors should also alert students to red flags to look out for to help them avoid staying in a bad role. For instance, they might notice feeling “stuck” in their job. Helping them prepare a backup plan in case the job doesn’t work out can avoid a feeling of being cornered, and give them alternate goals to work toward.
- Finally, students should be reminded that no job needs to be their forever job. A useful reframing can be the comparison between dating and marriage. In dating, you’re free to meet different people and see if you’re compatible, without the long-term commitment of marriage. Too often, students treat their next job as if they’re married to it, rather than being free to learn from the experience and search out a more compatible one.
Students should be encouraged to reflect regularly during their time in a job on what work they’re enjoying, what’s surprised them about the role and what they don’t want to do more of.
Ultimately, focused reflection is important at all parts of the career and job search, not just when students are in crisis or considering a career pivot. It should be done intentionally and regularly, with career advisors guiding students’ first attempts. Over several jobs, the insights generated from reflection will inform students’ fundamental job preferences, creating a compass to help them assess future opportunities against.
