Career Design: Design Your Career to Change Your Life

By Ashley Artrip

In Career Design: How to Design Your Career to Change Your Life, you'll learn what true career fulfillment means. You'll also see that you have many paths to get there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ashley Artrip
• Release date: Dec 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885049818

Book preview

Ashley_KDP_ebook_cover.jpg

Career Design: How to Craft a Fulfilling Career at Any Stage

Career Design: How to Craft a Fulfilling Career at Any Stage

Ashley Artrip

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Ashley Artrip

All rights reserved.

Career Design: How to Craft a Fulfilling Career at Any Stage

ISBN

979-8-88504-979-5 Paperback

979-8-88504-980-1 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-981-8 Ebook

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Your Career Doesn’t Need to Be Your Identity

Chapter 2: Career Design—A Better Way to Create a Fulfilling Career

Chapter 3: The Psychology behind Your Career Choices

Chapter 4: Career Portfolios over Career Paths

Chapter 5: Get Clear on What Matters Most: The Reflection Phase

Chapter 6: Your Mindset Is Everything

Chapter 7: The Path of Least Resistance—Playing to Your Strengths

Chapter 8: Develop Your Internal Compass

Chapter 9: Skills Are More Important than Titles

Chapter 10: Identify Your Options with the Definition Phase

Chapter 11: You Have to Know What You’re Looking For

Chapter 12: The Types of Career Changes

Chapter 13: Getting Tactical: Understand Your Career Criteria

Chapter 14: Create Your Career Profile

Chapter 15: Evaluating Career Paths

Chapter 16: Get Your Hands Dirty—The Testing Phase

Chapter 17: How to conduct initial research in the career you’re interested in

Chapter 18: Immerse Yourself

Chapter 19: Try It before You Buy It—Test Projects

Chapter 20: Landing the Job—The Launch Phase

Chapter 21: There’s a Better Way to Job Search

Chapter 22: How to Write a Target Job Description

Chapter 23: Ongoing Career Development

Acknowledgments

Appendix

I’m feeling stuck, and I’m not sure what to do next.

I feel like there’s something better out there for me.

I’m burned out and want a new challenge.

Introduction

Regardless of age, title, education level, or net worth, these are the sentiments I hear from people looking for something more out of their careers, even if they’re successful by traditional standards. We conduct extensive research on the various industries, ask for advice and reach out to others for support, and then we do our best to choose a fulfilling career. Inevitably, we hit roadblocks. We become burned out walking the career path we originally thought was perfect or end up realizing the career path we worked so hard to attain is not actually what we want.

My curiosity for career design began at an early age, seeing my parents dread going to work each day. I remember being afraid of growing up and becoming an adult because I thought it meant I would have a job I hated and couldn’t escape from until retirement. It turns out my parents aren’t the only adults who aren’t in love with their work. Gallup, a global research and consulting firm, does an annual nationally representative survey of working professionals and measures how engaged they are with their job. According to a 2021 article by Gallup, Inc., engagement is the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace. Shockingly, they consistently find that around 60–75 percent of working professionals in the United States are disengaged in their jobs year after year.

Dreading the world of work meant school was an anxiety-inducing space for me. I felt like I had to do everything perfectly so I would be able to control my fate postgraduation. It also led me to ask my peers in college why they chose their majors and what jobs they wanted to pursue after graduation to understand how they handled this important decision. After getting a lot of blank stares and hearing that they made their decisions based on input from other people (particularly from their parents), I had somewhat of an aha moment as to why there were so many disengaged professionals in the workforce. We’re not often formally taught how to create career goals, and we base a lot of our decision-making on assumptions rather than true data points, especially when we’re just starting out in the world of work. In other words, we’re unintentional about how we approach our career decision-making.

Since then, I’ve made it a commitment to dedicate my career to helping others find fulfillment in their professional lives. I’ve been fortunate enough to dive deep into the world of employee engagement and workplace performance research and consulting at Gallup, have had exposure to helping underrepresented populations get high-paying tech careers, and have learned all the barriers that privilege blinds us to in career decision-making. I’ve also supported thousands of working professionals by teaching them how to design a more fulfilling career as I’ve cofounded an organization called mission collaborative.

Adaptability Is Key

In the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin states that It’s not the strongest or most intelligent of the species that survives but the one that’s most adaptable to change. While much time has passed since he published his insights back in 1859, the ideas are just as applicable today, especially when it comes to our careers.

Twenty years ago, staying at one company for your entire career was normal. You’d start in entry-level positions and work your way up to senior and maybe even VP roles. After building enough savings in your 401(k), you’d retire after dedicating your entire career to a single company. That is no longer the norm. In fact, the average tenure in a position is now four to five years.

On one hand, working at one company for the rest of your career might sound reasonable for those who like the idea of steady job security. However, it often comes at the price of exploring your interests in other industries and roles and can quickly lead to you feeling burned out. On the flip side, while hopping around from job to job every four years or so may sound like freedom, it can often make us feel disconnected from having a broader career goal or a sense of purpose since our roles may not always directly build upon the experience of the previous responsibilities. Corporate loyalty and true job security have become things of the past. Many jobs that existed ten years ago—even five years ago—cease to exist due to automation and rapid advancements in technology.

Your career is always going to be in a state of metamorphosis. Your needs change over time, the job market changes, and life happens. Rather than aiming for perfection in your career, the goal should be to become adaptable to those changes so you can make the most of each time you’re at a crossroads. Since the new normal is about learning how to be adaptable, there needs to be a new vocabulary we can use to describe how we manage our careers.

Information Loops

What may be more concerning than the rapid change to the workforce is how society educated us to think about our careers and how to prepare for them. I remember less than ten years ago, we took career assessments in high school that were so outdated that the results of the tests were laughable. For example, a friend of mine took the assessment, and it told him that he should be a fruit sorter; I’m not kidding. Adding fuel to this already concerning fire is the fact that our education system is slow to adapt its curriculum in a way that could help young people become more adaptable to the ever-changing workforce.

There’s a massive disconnect between changes in the workforce and when a new career curriculum is actually implemented in schools to prepare students for what awaits them postgraduation. This leads to college grads being inadequately prepared for the workforce. Gallup has studied human behavior, employee engagement, and conducts globally represented survey research for 99 percent of the population. For over seventy years, it has researched the gap between higher education and the workforce extensively. In the Gallup-Lumina report conducted in 2013, the results showed a mere 14 percent of Americans strongly agree that college graduates are well prepared for success in the workplace. And barely one in ten (11 percent) business leaders strongly agree that college graduates have the skills and competencies that their workplaces need. (Gallup, Inc., 2021) We tend to rely on other people’s guidance regarding our early career knowledge, which has a massive impact on how we plan out the classes we want to take in high school and college, the extracurriculars we get involved in, and how we plan for our future.

While lack of career education is part of the equation, the other part is that no one actually teaches you what a successful career is and how to define that for yourself or how to navigate the many changes you’ll experience in your career. We often think finding a perfect career is like finding our soulmate. Once we find that perfect person, we can get married, and we’ll live happily ever after. In our careers, we hear a similar narrative; once we discover that one perfect path out there for us, we’ll be fulfilled for the rest of our lives. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but subscribing to these beliefs will set you up for a lot of frustration and disappointment.

I’m a firm believer that there’s no single person out there who is perfect for you that is just waiting for you to discover them. Instead, there are many people out there who could be a great fit for you. Regardless of your compatibility, the relationship will still take a lot of work. This is similar to our careers. No singular perfect career path is just out there waiting for you. Instead, several paths exist that will be fulfilling to you, and just like with any strong relationship, it takes a lot of work, and it’s not always going to look picture-perfect. We often romanticize our careers and our relationships because it gives us hope for our future. Instead, it creates a life of yearning for something that may never exist and a constant feeling of discontentment.

News flash: You’re going to get burned out, bored, or frustrated with your job at some point in time.

Instead, we should learn how to adapt to changing circumstances, listen to our inner voices, and make decisions that will set us up for success given our current situation. Given how quickly the workforce changes, we need to change how we manage our careers in response to those changes, as it has ripple effects on every aspect of our lives.

I’ve worked with people who climbed the ladder and achieved success by society’s standards who were completely miserable and wanted something else. Everyone will hit a point in their career where they will ask, What comes next? or feel like they’ve plateaued and hit a wall. While this might be an anxiety-inducing wake-up call, it’s an opportunity to create a bolder and more exciting life than you could’ve ever imagined. This is an opportunity not to feel existential angst when you start to feel restless after a few years of working in an unfulfilling job. Learning how to navigate this accelerated change of pace instead of resisting it can actually be enjoyable. You can look forward to moments in life where you’re asking yourself, What comes next? with optimism instead of dread.

The way to do this is by tackling career planning and inflection points in a methodical way, using frameworks that leverage your natural talents and abilities and take into account your broader life goals. This approach involves reflecting on what matters most to us, as well as taking inventory of what we’re good at and the skills we have and then applying them to small experiments that will help bring clarity to our decision-making process. You can use this framework repeatedly throughout your career because it is iterative and personal to you. This framework is called the career design process and has helped thousands of professionals find more fulfillment in their careers.

A New Way of Doing Things: Career Design

Career design is the act of intentionally crafting your career to make it fit you, whether you want to make the most of your current career path or make a bigger career change to something entirely different. Career design is all about understanding yourself, your goals, and your options then making a plan and taking thoughtful steps toward more fulfillment.

The career design process is a new way of tackling the biggest questions you’ll face throughout your entire career using the principles of design thinking methodology. Design thinking has revolutionized how we live, play, and