Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy. If you’re happy in what you’re doing, you’ll like yourself, you’ll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined.

Johnny Carson

By Alexandra Zatarain

 

Choosing a college major can be a difficult decision but also one with an enormous impact in career prospect. Mainly because of the existing differences in employment opportunities and pay that are available in the job market.

According to the 2011-2012 PayScale College Salary Report , if you wish to find a top paying job you should probably decide to study math or science. Even if there are still lucrative careers for English, history and foreign language majors, but the openings are scarce compared to engineering majors.

The following chart released by PayScale shows the top 10 highest paying college majors:

Also the Wall Street Journal provides a very descriptive table with a long list of college majors and their unemployment percent, median earnings, and popularity, among other descriptors.

 

It should be worth more than a paycheck

The previous are the money listings, how about happiness at work?

On a recent blog post we talked about job satisfaction, which makes us question if salary is the best motivator for everyone, and most of all, will a big paycheck really make us happy?

There’s no cookie cutter answer when it comes to finding your dream career, but there’s a starting point: know yourself. And to do so you have to be honest with yourself first.

Long Yun Siang, a career expert, shared a short list that will help people understand themselves in order to choose a job path they will truly love. The list includes the following:

• Know what you want: You must know what you want, not what you don’t. This is the beginning to discovering your dream career.

“The toughest part about finding your dream career isn’t about finding the dream career. It is about finding yourself.”

• Know your values: You can begin by asking yourself: what do I really value? Do you prefer to have free time and a low stress job or do you like to work in high stress environments full of uncertainty? These values are connected with your personality traits, which you have to question and explore in order to find what will fit with your life.

• Know how much you are willing to sacrifice: How much are you willing to do and sacrifice in order to fit the criteria your dream job needs?

• Do it for the right reasons: Yun Siang advises that “the trigger to how to find your dream career should never be money”.  A bump in your paycheck probably will not be enough to make you happy. “Money should never be a motivation. Make passion a motivation, but never money”. 

From my college days, I have always wanted to be in the advertising industry. That for me was a dream career. But back in the heydays of the dotcom era I was headhunted to join a B2B dotcom firm. They were willing to pay me double of what I was getting (yes, I was unhappy with my salary at that time). So, I took up the offer immediately. Guess what? I quit in 3 days and due to contractual obligation I had to serve a full month! That full month was a torture. It wasn’t what I was looking for at all. In some countries where payday loans are available some people would have taken it to get by.

•  Take your first steps:
• Do your research: Find out about the industry.

• Network with people in the industry: This will give you the opportunity to know and feel what people in that field think about their job, what they really do. Are they happy? Do they enjoy it? What’s the reality of that career in the workplace?

• Create a plan to pursue your dream career: Now that you know what it takes to succeed in your dream career, you should draft a concrete plan on how to obtain the necessary skill set, how to apply for the job, how to meet all the requirements. It’s time to execute.

 

The Hedgehog Concept

In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins defined the Hedgehog Concept, which comes from the understanding of the intersection of three circles.

The following is a graphical representation of the concept:

Each circle is a personal area of exploration in itself.

• What can you be the best in the world at? This area is about your natural abilities, skills, and personality qualities. To be great in your career you must have a natural aptitude towards it. This is the biggest mistake people make: not understanding their natural aptitudes and just going into a field because it’s economically rewarding or popular. People will not become great at something they can’t be the best in the world at.

•  What drives your economic engine? The natural aptitudes have to be a means of sustaining yourself economically. Your career choice based on your abilities must also be economically viable. Money is not the primary guide, but it is necessary to have a means for survival.

• What are you deeply passionate about? This is the most important element: find and do something that you are really passionate about. Maybe you are good at playing soccer, you can make good money out of it but if you are not passionate about it the odds are you will not be satisfied and fulfilled with your life choice.

 

The Hedgehog Concept is a great tool for both businesses and people to be able to go from good to great in all that they do, in who they are. But there is no magic recipe to finding a career path in which success is guaranteed, because in life nothing can be guaranteed.

It is in the journey of life where we will all discover what we are good at, what will provide to us, and what we really love to do.