So you are 17-25 and unsure what you want to do with your life…
I’ve been where you are. In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life until I hit 25.
I’ve lived in the Eastern, Central, Pacific, Mountain, and Alaska time zones since leaving home. See my post on choosing a geographical location. I’ve also worked in 4 wildly disparate career categories. So I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp of what the United States has to offer for a young person like yourself.
Picking a career can be hard. Even deciding if you want to go to college can be difficult, let alone what to study or which school to pick. Read on for a few of the pointers that helped me in my own personal search for the perfect career:
Interests:
If you are fascinated by a subject, and you want to/are willing to study it in your free time, you might want to pursue a career in that thing, whatever it is. Think about what you spend time doing, and what you would like to spend more time doing if you could.
Talents and Skills:
If you have a talent that you’ve practiced hard to get good at, and you are the best person you (personally) know at that thing, you should probably consider how you can fit your ability in that area with your calling/vocation in life. It might not fit with any of the careers that you are aware of, but ask people that you respect if they know of ways to apply those skills in a career path.
Ability:
This is your raw potential. What you are capable of at your very best. You haven’t developed a skill yet but you know that you could. This is your maximum potential under the right circumstances. For example, not everyone can succeed at math. You may be one of those people. If that is the case, engineering is not for you, no matter how interested you are in it. Engineering Technology on the other hand, perhaps. Even if you are great at math, perhaps you lack people skills. You didn’t get the opportunity to develop them in the environment that you grew up in, but you are confident that they will come. Start to try things out to see if you can master them, the more things you try out, the more you know what you have the ability to succeed at.
Self Discipline:
Certain careers take significantly more self discipline. If this isn’t something you’ve cultivated yet, consider whether you think you’ll be able to, or whether you’ll need to downgrade your aspirations to fit your lack of self discipline. (Keep in mind that you can increase your self discipline, this happens for many people as they age. For example, I personally wouldn’t have been able to finish an engineering degree had I started it directly out of high school, or if I had, my grades would have been far far worse.
Finances:
Not everyone is in the position to move forward with a college degree because of their finances. Very few people can live for free (though school can be almost free if you are smart, see my post on going to college for $75 a week). If you haven’t developed the necessary nest egg for school, consider living cheaply and working your tail end off until you have what you need. Be careful though, many people lose sight of their dreams and settle into a life of tedium because they don’t see progress toward their goals here.
Your Support Network:
Going to school is a difficult undertaking for more than the person who chooses it. It can be hard for their family and friends as well. I chose to go back to school later in life. I was able to choose that because my wife was supportive and did what it took to keep me in school. If you are a single dad, or you are providing for an elderly parent, excelling at school is going to be a lot more difficult, and you may need to take easier classes, or less classes per semester to maintain your sanity throughout school.
Other Things To Consider:
The biggest thing I can emphasize when considering your career path is to think ahead. Right now your interest is theater? Great, but be aware that you will probably not be among the stars of the stage. The chances of you landing a solid acting career are slim, and even slimmer if you aren’t willing to slog through several years of rejections before you get there. The data is in, and it shows that only about 2% of actors make enough money to live on. For every Morgan Freeman there is, there are literally thousands of extras who never get beyond the occasional un-credited acting part. Temper your dreams with reality. Get input from people you respect (real input, not just asking them to encourage you in the direction you’ve already chosen to go). If you like Computer Science and Pottery equally well, choose pottery as a hobby and the other as a career.
Be aware that your preferences change over time, so even if you don’t mind being a starving artist now, there may come a time when it gets irksome.
Start to try things out to see if you have interest in them, the more things you try out, the more you know what you find interesting.
Kids are expensive. If you plan to have children, consider choosing a higher paying career, even if your job satisfaction is slightly lower.
Not everyone who tries to become a full time artist will succeed. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve run into over time that have an “soft” degree of some kind who went back for a second degree, or leveraged their experience to move into another more lucrative but less desirable field. So when you are thinking of what career to pursue, be aware that those with extremely high job satisfaction often have a higher attrition rate because more people want those jobs than there are jobs available.
Please don’t be like me. A significant portion of my thought process for where I went to college directly after high school was something like this: “I want to go someplace that sounds fun”. My brothers had gone to a small college in southern Wisconsin that sounded like something from a dream. Cool people to hang out with, inter-mural sports 6 nights a week, and a cush job nearby that made paying for it all easy (notice that even 18 year old me thought about the financial side of things). They said the academics weren’t too challenging, which was a huge plus for me. I loved hanging out with people, and the way my brothers described it, there was a lot of that happening there. That was it. I asked my brothers whether I would be able to pay for it based on what I had in my bank account, and they said that I’d be fine if I could get the job that they had done: driving school bus. That was my entire economic analysis of where to go to school. No other opportunities were seriously considered. No idea what I would do with the degree when I graduated. And no awareness that technical schools existed where I could go to school for free… More on that in my other post here.
Other Options Besides College:
Cross cultural experiences:
Peace Corps: This is honestly a giant boost for your resume. I don’t exactly know why this is, and it isn’t something that people advertise, but everyone I’ve ever talked to in hiring has immense respect for someone who devoted a year of their life to a greater cause.
Christian Mission Work: If your church supports anyone, contact them and see if they need any help, or know of someone who does. This would be for those who would like to combine their volunteer service with something that they value, their relationship with Jesus.
Experiences in the USA:
Bible School: This is the route I personally did after High school. A solid choice if you feel uncertain about what you believe and you’d like to gain clarity about the Bible.
Wilderness Mentoring Camps: I have several friends that either run these or have attended them. They seem to be a mixed lot, with some being good, and others being a miserable experience. You should definitely talk to someone that has graduated from the program before you embark on this one yourself.
Start Your Own business: You can literally start your own pressure washing or lawn care business for a couple thousand dollars. See here for some other business ideas.
Work in a Factory: This is not something you want to do long term. Don’t get me wrong, there are certain perks, but it certainly isn’t the type of career that anyone should pursue unless life circumstances have closed all other doors. The remuneration is terrible.
Work in the trades: I worked in the trades for about 3 years full time, and an additional 2 years part time. I loved it. But the chances of sustaining a life altering injury are very high in this career. Accidents happen. The pay is fine, and most of these career paths allow you to open your own business (if you have the desire) after you have about 10 years of experience. But be prepared to “pay your dues” no one is pleasant to you in this type of position until you have proven yourself. And even then, many of the individuals you work with are, how do I say this delicately, “rough” / “real pieces of work”. Also, many of the jobs that you work (especially early in your career) may not cover vacation days.
Other: There are a few of you, probably less than 1 in a 1000, who have the chutzpah to do your own thing. Start your own business, succeed on your own, get excellent at that skill, and make money doing it. Go for it. Do it. Don’t be afraid of failure. Be afraid of not trying. The best time to fail in life is when you are young. That is because you have so many opportunities to recover after your failure. Also, when you are young you don’t have a lot of the baggage that you acquire later in life. You only have a finite amount of time, and if some of it is being eaten up in a relationship with a spouse, with kids, with maintaining a home, etc, you won’t have the time to focus on making that thing succeed. Also, unless you wait until later in life, when you’ve already amassed a decent amount of money, it can be very difficult to pursue something as risky as going out on your own or starting your own business when you have a family to support.
Specific Actionable Steps:
The following website will change your life if you let it:
It gives the wages of all the different jobs, and also has a write up about the amount of schooling that each career takes. I HIGHLY recommend it during your career search process. There is also a section on that website about what each career is like. You should read every article you can on the subject of your interest.
Please also consider reading my article on whether college is a good choice for you or not. For those of you who’ve already decided to go to college, how should you decide where to go to school? There isn’t any way around it, it takes work. Sit down and make a list of every school that you’d be willing to attend. Get on their website and look up their yearly tuition price, add $1500 to that number for fees and books. Multiply that price times the number of years you will be at the school, and that is the cost of attendance. Make an excel spreadsheet that has each of these numbers next to the school name, and list any other factors that would bring the cost of attendance up or down (expensive rent/living with parents/etc). A website like US News can make this process a lot quicker. I’d highly recommend using that site or a similar one, even if you have to spend a few bucks for a subscription.
Key Takeaways:
Okay. Here it is. If you walk away from this post with anything, make it this. Everyone has different interests and talents, but most people are not exceptional at anything. That isn’t a bad thing. I’m not exceptional either. That means that I probably am not going to make a good living as an artist, surfer, or some other job where the job satisfaction is VERY high, but median pay is low. This is why I went school for engineering. It was the shortest degree program I could find where the median wage over your career was north of 6 figures. Even a mediocre engineer makes good money.
You have the ability to DO HARD THINGS! I can’t stress this enough. YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS! School will be hard. Especially if you chose a career that has high expected earnings once you are done. People don’t know what they are capable of until they choose to try.
Don’t be afraid of taking a leap and failing. You found out something that you couldn’t do (at least at this point in your life). Find something else. And don’t be afraid to come back and try again, but give yourself some time to mature and gain some skills before you try again.
I believe in you. Get after it.