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Natalie is a teacher and holds an MA in English Education and is in progress on her PhD in psychology.
Joey is in a pickle. He's not sure what he should focus his career search on. On one hand, he kind of wants to go into sales and marketing; he hears that's a good choice and a way to make pretty good money. On the other hand, he also kind of likes school and thinks he might make a good English professor. What should he do?
Joey's questions are about his career, or occupational field. Think of a career like a staircase: it's a journey up towards the top, and each job is a new step. For example, Joey might get a job as a sales assistant, and then move up to senior sales associate, and then on to head of sales. Each of these positions individually is just a single step, but together, they make up the staircase of Joey's career.
Choosing a career path can be overwhelming. After all, there are many, many choices out there! And even someone like Joey, who has narrowed his options down to two careers, may find it difficult to choose a career.
Of course, Joey could always change his career path in the future if he really feels like he made a bad decision, but it is usually easier if you know which general area you want to get into from the beginning and don't have to change careers.
So, how can Joey make the best decision about which career is right for him? Let's look at how Joey can evaluate a career based on cost, benefits, and return on investment.
So, Joey is caught between a career in business or a career as an academic. Which is the better one for him? And how can he decide?
There are many things that go into deciding which career to choose. One of them is to compare the costs and benefits of careers to see which is better. This works particularly well when you have a few careers you are trying to compare, like Joey does.
The cost of a career is everything that it will take away from you. This includes time and money. For example, Joey can be a salesperson right out of college, but he'll have to go to graduate school to get a master's degree, or even a PhD, in order to become an English professor. A graduate degree can cost money, and Joey will have to spend years getting it. So there seems to be more costs involved in being an English professor than a salesperson.
But cost isn't the only thing that Joey needs to look at. He should also evaluate the benefits of each career, or what the career will give you back. The obvious benefit of any career is the money you'll make. Joey could make a lot more money in a business career, like sales, than in an academic career, like being an English professor.
Based on the costs and pay of each career, it probably seems like Joey's best bet is to become a salesperson. But pay isn't the only benefit to a career. Work-life balance, or being able to have free time while still working, is another major thing that Joey might want to consider. As a salesperson, he'll have to work a lot: He'll work long hours all year long, trying to get a new sale and working with his customers to make sure that they continue to buy from him.
On the other hand, as an English professor, Joey will have more free time. He can take summers off to spend with his family or just relax, and he won't constantly be at the beck and call of customers.
A low-stress environment is another benefit that Joey might want to take into consideration. Any job can be stressful, but there's a lot of pressure to do well in sales. Even if Joey gets a huge sale today, tomorrow his company might be asking, 'How much did you sell today? What's your next big sale, and when is it coming through?' Life as an English professor won't be without its own stresses, but there might be less pressure on him on a day-to-day basis.
So, Joey knows that there are costs and benefits to both of the careers he's considering. But how does he weigh them? That is, how can he make a decision based on costs and benefits, when both careers have different costs and benefits?
One way to compare careers is to look at their return on investment (ROI for short), or what the career will give you in comparison to what you have to do to be in that career. Essentially, ROI is the benefits of a career weighed against the costs of that career.
The actual ROI calculation for a financial investment would be the benefits minus the cost, divided by the cost. But when talking about careers, that equation doesn't work so well. After all, things like work-life balance or stress level don't have a number you can just plug into the equation.
So when comparing the ROI of two different careers, Joey should look at, overall, what the benefits and costs are for each career. For example, he might want to weigh the price of graduate school against the potential salary he would make as an English professor to see if that's really the value he thinks it is. He could also compare the money he would make as a salesperson against the high stress and low work-life balance.
Some careers will have a higher ROI than others, but that will depend on many factors. For example, in-demand careers will have a higher ROI because they will have a higher pay. If there's a shortage of people in a career field, it generally pays more.
While there's probably not a shortage of salespeople, Joey might run into the opposite problem with becoming an English professor. That is, saturated markets will have a lower ROI. In other words, if there are a lot of people in a career field, getting a job will be harder, and the jobs are likely to pay less. There are many, many people who want to teach college English, so Joey might have a hard time finding a full-time job, and if he does, the pay might not be very high.
So even though Joey can't do an exact calculation of ROI, he can think about the benefits and costs weighed against each other and consider things that might make a certain career have a higher or lower ROI.
A career is your occupational field, and it can be overwhelming to pick a career out of the many options out there. To find the right career for you, a good option is to figure out the costs (like time and money) and benefits (like pay, work-life balance, and stress level) of each career path. You can then figure out the return on investment (or ROI) for each career to try to make an informed decision about which career path is right for you.
By the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
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How to Choose a Career: Guidance Counseling5 chapters | 39 lessons
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