The latest career nonsense comes from a Newsweek "Perspective," summarizing a "survey" from the Daily Beast. The "top ten majors that don't pay" included journalism, horticulture, agriculture, advertising, music, child and family studies, fashion design, mechanical engineering technology, chemistry and nutrition.
The first problem with this kind of stuff is that parents, students, and even academics take it seriously. The obvious assumption is that your degree equals your earning power. That's pure, unadulterated bullshit. It's a classic example of wrongheaded, early-20th century thinking applied to a 21st century world. I'd ignore it, except that there is widespread acceptance of the perspective.
FYI: Your degree does not equal your earning power.
To an unfathomable degree, most thinking about careers is profoundly linear. It assumes a direct path between a person's major and that person's career. That assumption is powerful and deeply embedded in our thinking. From the time you played with fire trucks and told people you wanted to be a firefighter, the linear path has been assumed to be the natural state of things. As a consequence,nearly everybody thinks that you pursue a major that would become your ultimate career. Engineering majors become engineers. Law school grads become lawyers. Business majors become business people. History majors become . . . ? Hmmm . . .
As Katherine Brooks points out in her brilliant work, You Majored in What? (See "good books" on my blog sidebar), the linear path between your major and your career came out of the trait-and-factor approach of 1909, designed to determine the best career choices for people. As America evolved from an agricultural society to an industrial society, early psychologists sought ways to determine the best fit between individuals and their jobs. Career tests, like the famous Strong Interest Inventory or the Meyers-Briggs, were designed to match persons' interests with potential vocations.
Brooks has an enlightening analysis of college majors and jobs. She draws from alumni surveys from three institutions:
MAJOR JOB
- art cartoonist
- dramatic arts MTV program director
- economics bond trader, Wall Street
- government Republican national committee
- religion minister
- psychology psychotherapist
There's only one problem with the above list: it's all wrong. Here are the actual careers of those grads:
MAJOR JOB
- art special prosecutor, DA's office
- dramatic arts Republican national committee
- economics veterinarian
- religion MTV program developer
- psychology cartoonist
Reality just doesn't match up to the traditional career path. It isn't that the linear path has disappeared. Some psychology majors do become psychologists, etc. But linear thinking keeps people from thinking broadly about options and being open-minded to new opportunities.
I begin at a slightly different place than Brooks, but end up at the same place. I absolutely refuse to look at college degrees from the perspective of a specific vocation. I believe that the purpose of a college degree is to learn how to learn and how to think so that a person can make an informed decision. Choose a major that interests you so you can dig into that subject. But remember, the purpose of that major is to provide you with subject matter in which you can explore how the subject works, how it's put together, how to think about it, and how to learn it.
I'm a firm believer with that anonymous college career counselor who said that "it's ridiculous to ask liberal arts students (or any other college student) what they plan to do in five years. They don't even know what they plan to have for dinner."
After four to six years of college, you're ready to take on your first job. If you were smart, you spent your summers exploring jobs, or even served an internship, so you've got a bit of a network. Most aren't going to make much money right out of college anyway, so grab an interesting job and go from there. The market is chaos, and your thinking and your career are going to evolve. Keep your options always open and don't burn bridges. Keep learning and adding new expertise as you see opportunities.
My own career has followed the pattern I've just described. I used to say that I had vocational menopause every eleven years. At those breaks in time, I made major career shifts. Those shifts, however, were the result of evolutionary career processes that had been going on throughout the weeks and months of my work. Adapting, changing and growing. Unsatisfied with life and very curious, I was always writing a new life for myself--and continue to do so into my seventies.
That's not to say that some don't follow a direct path. My son-in-law decided when he was eight years old that he was going to be a scientist and a doctor and teach at Harvard Medical School. I'll be damned--he did it, in spite of the fact that he grew up poor as a church-mouse. However, like many professionals in their mid-forties, he left the Harvard position and has taken advantage of several options. He has what I think of as a multi-career: research, teaching (another university), consulting and contracting. Like me, he'd be bored on a one-way street. You're going to see more of that as global demands begin to be felt in all the professions.
Brooks takes today's cultural and economic chaos, and spells out a thorough-going process for career development. She argues, rightly, that careers follow chaos theory, the complex theory and practice that grows out of the mathematical formulas that were originally designed to develop a better weather prediction model. So think about it: how successful are we at predicting the weather? Sometimes we're pretty good. When the conditions are foreseen, when nothing changes, and when we know certain physical laws are being followed, we can predict the weather. If we see a front moving across the map, we know a storm is coming. But what happens when something interrupts the pattern? What if the front coming from the west suddenly encounters another storm coming up the East Coast? When and where will they meet? How well can we predict a tornado's path? Not too well generally. . . . Chaos theory helps us understand that too many variables in a complex system make it hard to predict the outcome.
We also know from chaos theory that the greater the distance between now and the future, the weaker our prediction will be. For instance, we're pretty good at predicting the weather today. Maybe even tomorrow or within the next week. But after that our prediction gets shaky. We may notice trends, or make logical inferences. . . but chaos theory helps us understand we can't predict the future in greater detail.
So, as Brooks rightly points out, career paths can be highly complex with all sorts of intervening variables, including family of origin, level of education, individual skills and talents, the job market, and so on. And like weather forecasting, career planning is a form of prediction, right?
Brooks doesn't say so, but I happen to know that meteorologists are the most accurate predictors in the world. Business people, lawyers, physicians, economists, etc, all pale when compared to the predictive ability of meteorologists. That'll drive you nuts, but it happens to be quite true.
So what's a person to do about his/her career? Chaos theory holds that systems ultimately reveal patterns and an order. What looks like chaos isn't always chaotic. Once again, I’ll use Brooks to make my point:
- use your knowledge of chaos theory to create a resilient career strategy that will serve you throughout your life,
- adapt to change and not be defeated by it,
- be open to possibilities, without simply going any way the wind blows,
- know you are in charge and can create each and every day of your life,
- have a direction, even though you're not arrogant or mindless enough to think that life will be served up in one neat linear package,
- embrace the chaos of your life and take it as a source or of pride.
