How do I get started in a career?

Here's my advice on "how to get started in a career" explained such that a five-year-old might understand it. It's supposed to be a general formula, not a specific recommendation for you. 1) Think of the things you find interesting or might find interesting to work on every day. If you can't think of things that are interesting at least think of things that would be pleasant and you could be good at. 2) Sort these thing in order of how much money you could be paid to do them, assuming you'd been working on them every day for 20 years. 3) Pick something from the top few places on the list, weighing possible salary and how much you'd enjoy it. 4) realize it's going to take you *20 years* to get where you were just looking, and you have a lot of time and practice to put in. I started programming computers when I was 15 because I thought it was interesting. I got a job doing real basic stuff laying out websites for like $10/hour when I was 17. If you'll pay attention to that, I was able to get a pretty lousy job after two years of part-time practice. In college, I worked part-time in an internship like position making somewhere between about $13-17/hr. When I left college (I was 25 by then, I did not follow the traditional college schedule exactly), I got my first "real" software job and was earning $68k/year. Note that this was after I'd been practicing, working and studying in this field for ten years. I am about to turn 31 and now have 15 years of experience in this field, most of it employed (if you count all the way back to the crappy job I had at 17), and five years in what I'd call sort of the "top-tier" silicon valley software community. I took a new job at the beginning of this year and am making more or less in the neighborhood of $150k/year. This has worked for me because software development is way up high on the list I made in step two, and because I have spent the last *15 years* working towards where I am today, continually improving my skills and making new connections with people who may need to hire programmers in the future (after so many years, I have friends and former co-workers who know my skills and would vouch for them, and are in the position to be able to hire people or at least make sure my resume lands on a hiring manager's desk, at a variety of companies many people would like to work for). Building a career is not like buying a car, where one day you don't have a car and the next day you do. It's like climbing a mountain, where you spend a long time getting to the top. When you've just started out, you can turn around and look behind you and you can't even see over the trees, and it looks like you haven't made any progress at all. The solution here is too just keep going. Eventually you will make it above the tree line and you'll just how high you've gotten. A mistake too many people make is to give up after a year or two, when they're still fairly close to the bottom, because the view from there isn't very impressive. They decide that what they need to do is go climb a different mountain, or go back to mountain climbing school. That's not it. The keys are: 1) choose a big mountain (from the list you made in step two). 2) just keep going. Try hard. Aim for the top. Even if you don't make it to the summit, you'll get a lot higher than you would wandering around a valley trying to pick the best mountain, or sitting on top of a 50 foot hill and saying, "well, I'm 50 feet up from the bottom, and the view's not bad. I can't go up from here, but I sure as hell don't want to go back down through that valley and lose the view I do have." And I have completely exhausted that mountain climbing analogy, but that's my take.

tylerkaraszewski's analogy is great. To add one element, some careers switch skillsets halfway up, just like mountains switch terrain. So keep in mind not only the height of the mountain and your enjoyment of the climb, but what kind of terrain changes you'll experience when. The first half of the climb might be hiking, or in the real world let's say it's technical skills like building a good database. Then, the terrain might change to bouldering, or in the real world let's say to managing other people. The terrain might even change again to ice climbing, or in the real world let's say to sales, fundraising, or politics. If you know you can't ice climb, don't evaluate the height of the overall mountain, but the height at which it changes to ice. Let's say you're a great logician and persuasive writer, but terribly anti-social. Well, looking only at the approach to the mountain, as a good writer, you could probably go into law, journalism, or many other fields. However, writing and logic remain important, and being anti-social remains somewhat tolerated until fairly high up the mountain in certain kinds of legal work (of course not all, with no offense intended to the many socially-skilled lawyers). Whereas in journalism, your career would likely max out much sooner if you lacked the ability to build relationships with publishers, win sources' confidence, and sell articles and books. Career changes often happen, I think, when people get halfway up the mountain and realize, "I'm okay at this career, but I'm never going to make it to the top because I don't want to do what it takes to make this next leg of the climb." Some decide to camp where they are, and some go all the way down again and try to climb up a more well-suited mountain.

One of the key takeaways from what color is your parachute is that if you aren't specific about what you want you're less likely to find it. Being totally open is not actually a huge asset in a professional job hunt because no one knows how to help you unless you say what field you are interested in. Imagine if you could say something like: "I'm interested in an entry level job in a company that designs websites" to your friends and acquaintances - you'd find that suddenly your friend Sally's cousin works at a place like that and is willing to do an informational interview. There's no way Sally would think of her cousin if you just said: "I need an entry level job with room for advancement." it's too generic. You need to just pick a field and start specifically networking and searching for entry level jobs in that field. If you wanted to get an engineering degree, what was interesting about that? Do you want to work at a tech company? If so, look into jobs at companies that have engineers working there. All of those companies have other jobs for people who aren't engineers (anything from operations to marketing to legal.) Try any kind of admin role as vegartanipla suggests, in any department and see what they do. Go from there. Be curious and take note of what you like and don't like about what everyone does. Etc.

3. Accept this as the New Normal and alter my lifestyle to live as comfortably and responsibly as possible on $22-28,000/year. This would probably involve leaving my job and this expensive city, possibly moving in with my aging parents, and accepting that I won’t be able to pay off my debt or save for retirement in a conventional sense. This...may just be how things are right now. Very few people seem to be having luck in job hunting, career starting, etc. This is why I'd say to not go back to school unless you are really sure that you want a job in an industry that requires advanced schooling. A lot of people have gone back to school and then still not been able to get jobs to pay off the even-bigger debt. And even the fields that seemed guaranteed to be big moneymakers are failing these days, like law school. My advice would be to keep plugging along with the applications-- 8-12 is probably paltry these days for the amount being set out-- and try to figure out a career field you might be interested in that doesn't require more schooling/debt. But right now, things are sucking for about everyone these days, especially folks out of college since 2008, and I'm not sure there's much you can do individually about that.

It's like climbing a mountain, where you spend a long time getting to the top...[e]ventually you will make it above the tree line and you'll just how high you've gotten. I want to preface this by saying that while I don’t resent your successes, I do think that it’s easy to look down from the heights back along your path and think how well it was chosen rather than how lucky you were. I was the produce buyer at a small food co-op from a few months before my eighteenth birthday until I was twenty-seven. I loved it, and I was good at it. For a good part of that time, my produce department was the only place to buy certified organic produce within 50 miles--in an unwashed armpit of the rust belt--and for all of it, I think, it was the best. I saw the department through the transition to the USDA National Organic Program and the 2001 recession. The customers loved me, and I brought business to the co-op even beyond what my department contributed to the overall margin. I started out at $5.00/hour, and when I finally saw the writing on the wall, I was making $16,000/year. The general manager may have pulled down $19,000. For a long time, it didn’t bother me that my job was unremunerative, because I loved it, and because I felt like I was part of something bigger than myself. When it finally did start to bother me, I did an about-face, climbed down, and went to college. At the time, in late 2004, the buzz was that biotech was a safe bet for a middle-class career, so I started a degree in biology. I worked throughhttp://www.detroitnews.com/article/20070123/BIZ/701230360, and by the time it was clear that biology wasn’t going to open the doors I thought it would, I was too late to correct my course (though I did still manage to graduate summa cum laude). At the end of my degree, I took a lab job in a small pharmaceutical company as a temp and a contractor. My commute, 3200 miles per month, ate a quarter of my gross income. And I was very, very slightly in the red every month just for the privilege of working. The permanent employees--who, if you count their education, had been improving their skills and making connections for eight or ten years--were only making a dollar or two more per hour than I was. I left, and a few weeks from being unable to pay my rent, got the job I have now. Since then, I’ve had one other interview with a manufacturer of medical devices. After asking pointed questions about whether I was involved with vegetarian or animal rights organizations while I worked at the co-op (I wasn’t), they announced that I might not be a good fit for a lab which experimented on animals. A key aspect of this metaphor, I think, is the sense of agency: you may not know the details of every slope, boulder and crevasse, but you can pick a mountain, gauge its height (say, eighty or ninety thousand dollars), and begin to hike uphill. You can climb down, if you like, and start up another hill, or you can decide to enjoy the view from below the ice fields at $45,000. And if you had asked me in 1998, or 2003, or 2007, I would have said, yes, I feel like I’m on a mountainside, and I feel like I’m climbing. Now, I don’t. I don’t feel like I have that much agency. I feel like the choices I make in my life have little-to-no bearing on the outcomes. I’ve made decisions in good faith and based on the best information I had at the time, and I’m staring down the second half of my thirties with no savings and no money in my checking account until Friday, and, frankly, it frightens me. If I’m on a particular mountainside, I’m there because I needed to start climbing something before started missing rent and student loan payments; if I have to force a metaphor of my own, I’m slogging through dunes. The peaks shift and blow away, I can’t tell where I am, and sand is getting in my knickers.

2. I don’t have any strong preferences about what kind of work I eventually do. I did the What Color is Your Parachute? thing a few years ago and my only conclusion was that I should have gotten an engineering degree. I'm no expert (other than having a job, I guess), but I'd venture that this is your main issue. You can't network if you aren't networking in a direction, if that makes sense. I'm not saying that you need to be all "follow your passion!", but unless you can define some functional areas, or a professional field, that maps onto modern industry/professional/career tracks, it's really hard to do anything other than drift. And this: I did the What Color is Your Parachute? thing a few years ago and my only conclusion was that I should have gotten an engineering degree. If you were sure that was the right track, why not start the engineering degree? The point being that starting something is better than futzing around and years later saying "I coulda/woulda/shoulda."

I want to preface this by saying that while I don’t resent your successes, I do think that it’s easy to look down from the heights back along your path and think how well it was chosen rather than how lucky you were. I only sort of agree. It's easy to tell these career stories without emphasizing luck and privilege, but it's also really common to talk with people who aren't able/willing/interested in slogging through the foothills (to stay with the mountain metaphor). I get people stopping by for "informational interviews" now and then, and I'm pretty sure that of all of them, only one has followed through and actually started working in the field; I run into a few of the others around town and they are all still stuck in the "I dunno" stage. Accept this as the New Normal and alter my lifestyle to live as comfortably and responsibly as possible on $22-28,000/year. This would probably involve leaving my job and this expensive city, possibly moving in with my aging parents, and accepting that I won’t be able to pay off my debt or save for retirement in a conventional sense. That sounds like about what my organization would pay for genuinely entry level work, for someone with maybe some education but no experience or special skills, so the raw salary you are talking would be reasonable here, for what that's worth. The interesting thing is watching who gets resentful and quits, and who kicks ass and gets promoted or gets hired away -- that seems to be an individual choice, and what feels to one person like a dead end job will seem to another to be a stepping stone. As someone very slightly higher on that "mountain," those possible career paths from the entry level jobs look really obvious to me in a way that I don't think they are for someone slogging through the sand dunes, as you described it. And if you had asked me in 1998, or 2003, or 2007, I would have said, yes, I feel like I’m on a mountainside, and I feel like I’m climbing. Now, I don’t. I don’t feel like I have that much agency. I feel like the choices I make in my life have little-to-no bearing on the outcomes. I’ve made decisions in good faith and based on the best information I had at the time, and I’m staring down the second half of my thirties with no savings and no money in my checking account until Friday, and, frankly, it frightens me. If I’m on a particular mountainside, I’m there because I needed to start climbing something before started missing rent and student loan payments; if I have to force a metaphor of my own, I’m slogging through dunes. The peaks shift and blow away, I can’t tell where I am, and sand is getting in my knickers. That sounds less like a question about how to find a career path, and more an expression of frustration and demotivation. Not that that's a bad thing, but it might be worth reflecting about what advice you are ready to hear, or if you first need to work through the anger and frustration to be able to look more dispassionately at the situation and try new things.

(I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound like I was saying you are currently "futzing around"; I was trying to say that if something like going back to school is better done sooner rather than later, because it's so easy to have it be four years later without even starting anything.)

I've posted this reply before so I'm not going to type it out its entirety again,but here are some suggestions as to how to http://ask.metafilter.com/183382/If-you-dont-have-the-wherewithal-you-dont-need-the-why#2638852http://ask.metafilter.com/166292/Have-the-job-search-methods-laid-out-in-What-Color-Is-Your-Parachute-worked-for-you#2391153.Before you roll your eyes, they are very useful; not to have someone hire you per se, but to have someone give concrete feedback as to what goes onto a resume for your desired field (as in what hot terms are HR pple looking for and/or hiring managers), other job titles to search for,other ways through the back door,etc. You can google the desired job position +location +other search terms or look around linkedin (or your former pool of uni students if your uni gives you access to it) and ask people to meet with you. Also, I'm just throwing this out there - but do you like to write or edit? I would think that with a biology degree that you could break into jobs for medical writing (intro level/find places that tend to hire pple with undergrad level degrees). If you want to know more about this memail me and I can probably point to companies in your area and you can go from there. You would at least be reading and writing material related to your degree, unless there is some reason that you do not want to do so. Why not do lab work? Unless you are in an odd area, the salary should at least equal to what you get now AND you can get free courses/some people have been able to get fully funded masters degrees in biology,but they had to have lab experience (undergrad degree does not equal lab experience- show you can do with a job). You may have ruled this out for some reason, if so, ignore.