What Color is Your Parachute? (Post #2)

          During my last conversation with Mr. Miller, we spoke about a classic job-hunting book: What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles. Through a series of useful recommendations (to be in the minority who send a follow up thank-you note, or to make sure you learn about a job from people at the company before applying for it, for example), the book highlights the most important factors in the job search process, and helps narrow down fields of interest and useful skills. In a lot of ways, finding a job isn't unlike dating-- neither you nor your employer wants to end up in a position where you're unhappy or unqualified. Businesses have problems, and their people ought to be the solutions.

   

         I would certainly recommend the book as a useful resource for Wheaton students working towards discerning what line of work they'd like to spend the rest of their lives pursuing, but I'll briefly summarize it here. There are a few key factors that really play into the work we love-- values, geography, people environments, working conditions, fields of interest, and transferable skills. As with shopping for a car, a few of these take precedence. The big two are transferable skills and fields of interest. Transferable skills are things that you most enjoy doing (and that you're good at!) which can be applied to help solve problems in your line of work. In my one-page summary (a diagram that captures many of my preferences, based on activities in the book) I tended to prefer evaluating, deciding, researching, and getting things done. Fields of interest, on the other hand, are things you have experience with or simply love to learn about or do. Some examples on my sheet are language, finance, environmental science, and fitness.

          While it would be difficult to find a job that fulfills all of your preferences, you'd be surprised at the connections you can make (one could, for example, run the numbers at a foreign environmental science firm, and knock out finance, environmental science, and language). Simply asking around with people in the industry and conducting informational interviews is a fantastic first step. As long as you can offer value to an employer with transferable skills, and work in a field you enjoy, the rest is icing on the cake. To avoid decision fatigue, in larger industries (say, fitness and finance), you can limit options by including other qualifiers (geography, values, working conditions), until you have around 10 great companies to research and apply to. I hope this helps, and would certainly advocate reading "What Color is Your Parachute." 

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