Careers For Dummies

Marty Nemko

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119482338
• eBook ISBN: 9781119482345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Feeling stuck? Find out how to work toward the career of your dreams

If you're slogging through your days in a boring or unrewarding job, it may be time to make a big change. Careers For Dummies is a comprehensive career guide from a top career coach and counselor that will help you jump start your career and your life. Dive in to learn more about career opportunities, with a plethora of job descriptions and the certifications, degrees, and continuing education that can help you build the career you've always wanted.

Whether you're entering the workforce for the first time or a career-oriented person who needs or wants a change, this book has valuable information that can help you achieve your career goals. Find out how you can build your personal brand to become more attractive to potential employers, how to create a plan to "get from here to there" on your career path, and access videos and checklists that help to drive home all the key points. If you're not happy in your day-to-day work now, there's no better time than the present to work towards change.

• Get inspired by learning about a wide variety of careers
• Create a path forward for a new or better career that will be rewarding and fun
• Determine how to build your personal brand to enhance your career opportunities
• Get tips from a top career coach to help you plan and implement a strategy for a more rewarding work life

Careers For Dummies is the complete resource for those looking to enhance their careers or embark on a more rewarding work experience.

Part 1

Finding Your Place in the Work World

IN THIS PART …

How the world is changing

Figure out where you fit

Find under-the-radar niches

Chapter 1

Understanding Today’s and Tomorrow’s World of Work

IN THIS CHAPTER

Seeing what will likely endure

Seeing what will likely change

The saga of a career

This chapter can help you find your place in the world of work, both today and tomorrow.

More specifically, it looks at what’s likely to remain the same —and what’s likely to change — over the decades of your work life. Although I’m not in possession of a crystal ball, I do have some insights into what you can expect to come down the pike over the course of the next 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years. This chapter spells out some of those insights.

Timeless Truths

It’s been said that the only person who likes change is a wet baby. So let me start by describing what’s likely to remain relatively constant over your workspan.

What employers seek in an employee

Employees with the attributes described in the following list will continue to have good job prospects:

• Tech-plus: Ever more jobs will require both soft and technical skills. Some jobs will continue to require mainly what are referred to as soft skills — effective communication, organization, and attention to detail, for example. But ever more jobs will also require skills that are far more technically oriented. It could be simply knowing how to use the field’s major software, or it could be having in-depth knowledge of supply chain management or machine learning design.
• Reasoning skills: Most well-paying jobs require employees to make many decisions each day that require good thinking skills, including the not-so-common “common sense.”
• Emotional solidity: A person can be smart and knowledgeable yet be unsuccessful. Success requires resilience to life’s slings and arrows. You may be able to develop and strengthen that capability to an unexpected degree, as you can see in Chapter 13.

Large organizations are desirable employers

Start-ups make for lots of sexy-sounding headlines because of a ping-pong and Red Bull culture, and when a start-up goes public, it makes its founders zillionaires. Beyond the headlines, start-ups have other pluses: They often allow you to wear many hats in the service of a cutting-edge product and offer the prospect of a big-buck exit. Just remember that most start-ups quickly go bust, leaving employees jobless and with stock options worth zippo.

Sure, working for a large company has some disadvantages: Your role may be narrow, and you may be forced to follow procedure and the chain of command. But a solid structure can help a company be greater than the sum of its parts. Combine that concept with the deep pockets, refined processes, and good products associated with larger companies and it’s easy to understand why many graduates of prestigious colleges continue to want to work for category killers like Apple, Google, Citibank, Johnson & Johnson, Goldman Sachs, 3M, General Electric, and Procter & Gamble. Similarly, people who prefer nonprofits are attracted to major players like UNICEF, Planned Parenthood, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And, people who prize job security and a prosocial mission gravitate to the largest employer: the government.

The importance of choosing a career wisely

Finding a career that matches your abilities, interests, and values will remain important, and not just because your success and happiness matter. If you’ve picked correctly and thus stayed in your career for at least a few years, you’ll have had the time to acquire the in-depth knowledge that many careers require.

Rigorous hiring practices

Today’s job seekers are likely aware that candidates applying for good jobs are often invited to apply: They’re “referred in” by colleagues, or recruiters find them by trolling professional forums and speakers’ lists from professional conferences. (For a database of professional associations, check out www.directoryofassociations.com.)

So, participate in your profession’s community. That makes you more employable and competent and, in turn, feeling better about the work you do.

In recent years, job seekers have come to expect multiple rounds of interviews and tests of their technical skills, from typing to coding. That will continue. It means that job seekers will continue to need to show, not just tell. For example, today’s winning résumé should usually include a professional development section that lists key learning outcomes from career-specific trainings: from an in-person workshop to an online certificate.

The good news is that hiring practices involving multiple interviews help ensure that merit, and not other factors, drive hiring decisions. That benefits not only good candidates but also coworkers and customers.

Home work

More and more people are working from home. Because of the ever-growing traffic in many cities, more employees are asking to telecommute, or work from home, at least for part of the work week. Many employers support telecommuting because it saves the expense of providing office space. In addition, cheap, reliable videoconferencing makes video meetings more acceptable than in the past.

Gigification

Many employees will continue to be needed full-time — 52 weeks a year. But employers will continue to replace other employees with “gig” employees, or just-in-time employees, who are contracted to complete specific projects.

Employers are sometimes tempted to replace full-time employees with these “giggers” because it’s ever more expensive to hire U.S. workers. That expense includes not just salaries but also government-mandated benefits and protections: increased Social Security and workers’ compensation limits, employee lawsuits, and employer-paid healthcare, for example.

Some people lament America’s gigification. They prefer stability over having to look for new work every few months. They prefer working with the same people for a long time — it can feel good to experience life’s key times together. On the other hand, some people like the gig economy’s flexibility: They benefit from the novelty of the experience, the option of taking breaks to complete that dream project or travel destination, or perhaps even a chance at a fresh start after a financial meltdown, for example.

What Will Likely Change

During your workspan, the world is sure to change dramatically. The following sections take a look at what changes will most likely affect your world of work.

Yes, the robots are coming — but not so fast

Sure, more jobs are becoming automated, but the worry that robots will entirely take over the workforce may be overblown. Yes, though repetitive work will likely be automated, for at least the next decade, most jobs requiring judgment will be augmented by — but not replaced by — technology. For example, physicians will have sort of a Dr. Watson to aid in diagnosing patients and choosing a treatment — though we’re a long way from having to hear the online receptionist say, “The robot will see you now.”

The truth of the matter is that every time a new technology has been developed — from the steam engine to the search engine — it was predicted that the technology would kill jobs. More jobs were created, however, including many that couldn’t even have been imagined. Plus, in selecting the 340 careers to include in Part 2 of this book, I’ve considered the risk of a career being automated. There should be ample options, both technological and not, that would capitalize on technological advances. Here are a few examples:

• The fashionable future: It shouldn’t be long before you can visit a clothing website, pick a fabric and style, and enter your body measurements — and then print the perfectly customized item at home on your 3D printer. Yes, this system will eliminate repetitive clothing manufacturing jobs, but those are low-paying and not fun, anyway. The replacement jobs will inevitably be more interesting. For example, people will likely buy more clothes, given how easy and (eventually) inexpensive it will be to purchase what they’re in the mood for. That will create jobs for everything from fabric designer to image consultant and from fabric-ink manufacturer to repairer of those printers eternally cranking away in 3D.
• Future (Data) Farmers of America: In this increasingly ever more data-centric world, people will be hired to collect and interpret the information that companies, nonprofits, and government are acquiring. Consider merely how much data Google and Facebook alone already have on each of its users. Artificial intelligence will enable ever more personalized ads to be presented; it will even infer your moods and send you just-in-time ads. That will increase the number of jobs that are available, for example, as data scientist, market researcher, marketing manager, social media marketing specialist, nonprofit fundraiser, and donor database manager.
• The future of love: Even advances in dating will create jobs. Dating already has evolved from the old-fashioned matchmaker to Match.com and a bevy of similar dating sites, from Tinder to J-Date. New jobs will likely be created because of next-generation dating sites: An algorithm will infer your essence from your social media posts and then suggest good fits. Swipe right and you’ll see a 3D holographic video of the person introducing himself. (Or herself. I rotate the terms in this book.) Swipe left and you’ll teach the algorithm to improve its predictions. Jobs ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Finding Your Place in the Work World
• Part 2: The Careers Catalog
• Part 3: Getting Trained, Getting Confident
• Part 4: Landing a Good Job Faster
• Part 5: Succeeding in Your Career
• Part 6: The Part of Tens
• About the Author
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• Index
• End User License Agreement