While job titles are useful shorthand in the world of work, and can give you a general sense of what people do for a living, there’s no question that the number of titles out there has exploded in recent decades. Back in the pre-2000 days, for those who might recall, most people would simply say they were a salesperson or marketing professional or IT manager and the like and you’d get the gist of it. Fast-forward to today’s market, however, and there are thousands upon thousands of new occupational niches that have emerged — and even a career coach can’t necessarily keep up with all of them!
This being said, I’ve felt for many years that there’s a single overarching definition that EVERYBODY can use to accurately explain their career focus. All you have do is answer the question “what kind of problems do you solve for money?”
To me, this question is really telling. Some people don’t miss a beat and offer up answers like “I collect blood samples from people in safe, comfortable fashion” (phlebotomist) or “I help ensure corporate events run on time, stay on budget, and are extremely memorable” (event planner) or “I make sure executives have the most accurate data possible about the business so they can make good strategic decisions.” (business intelligence analyst).
Other people who struggle to answer this question give me pause, however. At the end of the day, if one has difficulty connecting the work they do to the bottom-line of the business — or the mission of the nonprofit, school, or public sector institution — that can be a sign of a career that’s at risk or where a person may not be in a position to market themselves very effectively. Ultimately, after all, people are offered jobs not out of the goodness of the hiring manager’s heart, but based on the perception they’ll be able to solve a problem or capitalize on an opportunity the company currently isn’t able to address with their existing staff.
So what does this have to do with career change? Frankly, when you realize the dizzying number of new occupational paths that are out there, I sometimes think it’s easier to reverse-engineer your options using the problem/solution framework. Think hard about all the problems you HAVE solved to date, both personally and professionally, and which ones you’d be energized to solve again in the future. Ask the people in your network to talk about the problems they’re witnessing in their organizations and the talents that likely would be needed to address them. And if you think you might have the right chops for self-employment, ask yourself which nagging challenges you’ve wrestled with as either a consumer or within your work roles to date — and then brainstorm whether there might be an innovative, lucrative way that you could make a living solving these issues.
Case in point? I had a client who had been working as a civil engineer and who became more and more drawn to the idea of applying her talents to solving humanitarian issues in developing countries, given her own background of immigrating from such a nation. As a result, we brainstormed a whole mess of problems such countries are facing — ranging from the need for economic development opportunities to access to clean water to the promotion of human rights — and these topics propelled us to researching/identifying over 200 employers in Washington State working on these exact issues. Following this compass heading, she set up 5-10 networking meetings each week with people at these organizations until the “stars aligned” and one day a mid-level manager at a water purification technology company said “Hey, with your background, is there any chance you’d be interested in helping us teach people in other countries how to use our products and adapt them to different cultural environments?”
Again, focusing on the problems you would like to solve certainly isn’t the only way to go about the career exploration process, but it provides a slightly different lens for looking at things — and I’ve seen it lead to some great results over the years!
