In a world of interesting career opportunities, the question of how to pick a career is being asked of people across the globe. Could it be that you are asking the wrong question?
We are told from a very young age that we can be whatever we want to be and that we should follow our passion. Is this setting us up for a life of unfulfillment and a sense of failure?
In order to pick a career, you need a guiding mission that sets the trajectory of your career, a guiding light rather than a set career path.
I have come to this conclusion from theoretical study and practical application.
Practically, I have spoken to hundreds of people who are deemed to have made a “successful career” and interviewed a number of them for the Career Stories section of the Get Into Nuclear website.
The one thing that stands out is that the vast majority of them say that they “fell into nuclear” rather than set off from school with the idea that a career in nuclear is for them.
Theoretically, I like to read — and read, and read. I have read many autobiographies and books on building the perfect career. But, I have always struggled to put any sense to them. Many seem to stumble across their career and the advice on “lifestyle design” and “affirmations” doesn’t really sit right with me.
I could never put my finger on it until I read a book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport.
What is a Career
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a career as: “the job or series of jobs that you do during your working life, especially if you continue to get better jobs and earn more money.”
Wikipedia says: “The career is an individual’s metaphorical “journey” through learning, work and other aspects of life. There are a number of ways to define career and the term is used in a variety of ways.”
I will define what a career means to me at the end of this article series. However, for now, let us think of a career as the series of paying jobs you do throughout your working life.
Do you have the correct mindset?
We are often told, and it is advised that we all have a passion that will provide the perfect career for us. If I write down three passions of mine;
bringing about environmental change,
reducing inequality in the workplace, and
bringing long-term well-paying jobs to postcodes that historically have not been given such opportunities.
These are the passions that got me to build Get Into Nuclear in the first place.
Although we need to find something that drives us and gives us a sense of being, not all passions are going to be able to provide us with a career, or in other words, pay the bills.
This is where the Cal Newport book changed my perspective. It is advised that you do not pursue a career based on your passions, but based on a mindset of becoming a craftsman — I prefer to use the word practitioner.
According to Newport, we should not look at what the world can provide for us but at what we can provide for the world. Have a practitioner’s mindset.
Work to be the best at whatever it is that you are doing with the understanding that those skills, or career capital, will pay dividends in the future.
Practitioner Mindset
The change from a passion mindset to a practitioner mindset doesn’t mean that you cannot love what you do. Expecting the universe to provide you with your passion, however, leads many of us to disappointment when our passions never reveal themselves.
Rather than defining a passion from your predetermined views on the world or from one of the many personality tests that are available, let’s be more proactive and figure out what makes a remarkable life remarkable.
To answer this exact question, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan created the Self-Determination Theory that was defined that “to be happy, your work must fulfil three universal psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness”.
Breaking this down, to have a successful career we must find something that:
We have control over how we spend our time and what we do.
We are good at, enjoy doing and take a sense of meaning from.
We get a sense of connectedness by being part of something bigger.
Considering the above, our ikigai* should be to find happiness in our work. And to do this we need to focus our career plan on achieving control, competence and connectedness in our work.
The good news; by taking this approach you needn’t lose sleep over any individual or career choice you make, as “working right trumps finding the right work”.
*Ikigai is an old Japanese concept for finding happiness at the intersection of what you love, are good at, and the world needs and is willing to pay you for. See the below diagram.
Credit: Wikimedia
What is the difference between a passion and a mission?
When someone thinks of a passion, it is usually around the emotion of what feels good. As a result, you often hear the term “do what you love”. However, doing what you love doesn’t always provide you with a means to make a living.
A mission, in our context at least, is a career goal that allows you to use your expertise to make a change in the world. Although often your mission will lead you to enjoy and feel passionate about what you do in your working life, it is not the driver or a prerequisite to happiness.
A mission is not easy to find. Most people do not leave school knowing that they want to be a pilot or a nuclear physicist. Additionally, for most, it is not possible to leave school and decide that you are going to travel to Asia for a month to figure out your mission.
Typically a person’s mission is only discovered once they master a particular skill, field or industry. At this point, you will find the adjacent possible in which your true mission, or at least your next mission emerges.
You are unable to change the world until you have mastered a rare and valuable skill that enables you to see potential changes in the world.
To quote Cal Newport on his blog, you “need a non-conformist’s confidence and a dedication to exploration. [But,] this sense of exploration has to be backed by competence in the relevant field.”
So, the challenge for those seeking to achieve their ikigai is “to balance a myopic focus on getting good with a regular infusion of exploration and a sense of possibility”.
Passion driven = do what you love; — e.g. artist, drummer, sportsman — is this achievable? Will it pay the bills? — for some, yes. For most, no.
Practitioner driven = focus your effort on rare and valuable skills; —e.g. social value, latest design software, another language — Are these skills rare and valuable? — there are endless opportunities to upskill here.
Mission driven = focus your effort on a useful cause; —e.g. social value manager, engineering manager, international project manager — Does your practitioner focus align with your mission? Do they align with your ikigai? — If you can answer these questions “yes”, you will propel your career where many people plateau.
Already have a clear mission?
If you have a clear career mission from the outset that you are confident will give you control, enjoyment and connectedness. You then need to work backwards to gain the skills needed to progress up the career ladder.
For example, if you are clear that you want to be a project manager in the nuclear industry, undertake a career mapping exercise [link], to map out your career path as — Project Assistant > Project Engineer > Project Manager > Senior Project Manager > Project Director > Chief Operating Officer — now get to work building the skills needed to upskill and level-up to the next step on your career journey, then rinse and repeat.
Make sure you speak to others that have already done it then put your head down and follow your mission. Do not fall prey to distractions trying to knock you off course, stay on the path.
I wish you the best of luck and hopefully, you will get the happiness you deserve from your chosen career
Can’t Pick A Career?
If like me, you had (or still have) no idea what you want to be when you grow up, then there is good news and bad news.
The bad news is that you are going to need to make a decision, stick with that decision and put in the hard work for a number of years.
This is the part that no one likes to hear. But pretty much everyone that I have spoken to who has a successful career has had to go through it.
The good news, as long as you stick to the principles we are going to run through below, it doesn’t really matter which decision you make as the process ultimately takes you to the ‘adjacent possible’ in which your next mission will present itself.
The world doesn’t owe you anything. Your boss won’t immediately let you pick your next assignment. You can’t decide you want to take a month off each year to travel around France.
To get these rewards you need to build rare and valuable skills that you can cash in for rewards that will give you more control, enjoyment and fulfilment.
Before I go continue to look at how we decide which skills to pursue, I just want to clarify something to those who are not currently working — students leaving college or people in-between jobs.
Don’t waste any time searching for the right career. Find a job, any job that is available. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make you happy right now, you can always quit later. You need to find what it is that you truly value, and work at that every day. It is by working in a paying job that we are able to do this.
Rare and valuable skills
There are many skills that you can choose to develop. We are not talking about general communication, persuasion, teamwork or leadership-type skills. These general skills are important to change the way that you are perceived.
As part of achieving our mission, we need to develop skills that change what you are to your company or industry.
Furthermore, when you are the top performer in your company or the leader in your field, you will naturally develop the other skills or they will become less significant in defining your success.
There are a couple of ways that you can identify the rare and valuable skills that you need to work on through your everyday business interactions.
#1 Identify someone you admire in your field and ask yourself the question of what they can do that you can’t. This is something that Tony Robbins terms, Modelling.
They may have a qualification, technical skills, or a way of communicating you don’t currently possess. They could also have specific industry or functional knowledge. It could even be a reputation or network that they have built over years.
List them down.
#2 You can listen to feedback. From team members, bosses, customers, and pretty much any other stakeholder that is involved in, or affected by what you do. What are their current issues? What task would they pay someone to take off their hands? What skills are they lacking?
List them down. Could you upskill yourself to solve one of these problems?
#3 Now you have a list of rare and valuable skills, it is time to look at yourself. Look at the skills that will give you career capital in the future and identify where you have any gaps.
This exercise often depends upon where you are on the career ladder. In more junior roles, you will be looking to improve your technical capability (learn design software, gain risk management experience, work on writing skills). In more senior roles you will be looking to improve your supporting skills (leadership, communication, motivation). You now have a list of skills to work on.
Before we discuss how to do this in the next section, it is important to not fall into a trap when looking into the skills you are going to develop. Do not proceed, or at least do not prioritise skills that are high in demand as they will not be seen as rare and valuable.
Additionally, do not pursue skills that people are not willing to pay for. Ask or seek evidence first.
Credit: Brett Jordan UnsplashDeliberate Practice
Now you know what rare and valuable skills to acquire to propel you up the career ladder in pursuit of your mission, it is time to get to work and learn them.
Deliberate Practice is a term coined by K. Anders Ericsson which is used as a blueprint to ensure your training is effective in making you valuable.
It encompasses the five steps below:
The first step involves working out what market you are in — “winner takes all” or “auction”?
“Winner takes all” markets are those in which there is only one type of career capital available and everyone is competing for it.
Writers, standup artists, or brain surgeons. For example, the only capital a software developer has is their software writing capability.
“Auction markets” are less structured and different people in similar roles may get there by generating a unique collection of career capital.
For example, the career capital of a CEO could come from Finance, Technical, Marketing or Operations.
The second step involves identifying what type of career capital to pursue.
If you are in a winner takes all market, this is pretty simple as there is only one type of capital.
For an auction market, you have flexibility. One thing you can do is to seek open doors. These are the opportunities that are already open to you based on the career capital you have already generated.
Open doors allow you to move quickly and they build momentum as you progress. This is where it can often be difficult to move into another field, particularly later on in your career as it is difficult to find open doors with a limited network in the sector*.
*Spoiler alert! In subsequent articles in this series, we will discuss how changes in demand for work in the nuclear sector is opening doors that have been closed for decades.
The third step is that you need to define what success looks like. You need clear goals — if you don’t know where you are headed it is hard to take effective action.
If you take the rare and valuable skill identified above and then decide to learn a topic or skill by reading a book, signing up for an online course or enrolling on a new qualification, success is still not guaranteed.
If you want to increase the chances of successfully acquiring career capital you need to set goals or benchmarks.
Benchmarking will give you a clear definition of success. Examples include:
Rare and valuable skill: Risk Management. Benchmark: implement and manage risk management across Project X during the next project phase.
Rare and valuable skill: Written Communication. Benchmark: write 10 articles on LinkedIn seeking feedback from peers.
Rare and valuable skill: New Design Engineering Software. Benchmark: gain certification and run internal intro presentation in the office.
Rare and valuable skill: Twitter Marketing. Benchmark: generate 100 Tweets with supporting analysis paper.
Don’t just look to get better, find a project that with your current level of skill, you currently couldn’t achieve, but with your new skills, you will be able to. You need to be uncomfortable to improve.
The Fourth step is that we have to stretch and destroy.
Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, but is the opposite of deliberate practice.
To grow we need a deliberate effort of practice — not just mindlessly repeating something you can already do, over and over again. Many people find a plateau whereas following deliberate practice will push you past this plateau.
However, deliberate practice is often difficult and not enjoyable — hence the term stretch.
You also need to embrace immediate honest feedback even if it destroys what you thought was good. Go to lengths to keep a constant stream of feedback. Harsh feedback can accelerate your growth.
And the fifth step, be patient. You need to have a long-term perspective. You also need to remain focused on your mission and ignore the distractions that entice you across the journey.
Acquiring capital can take time. Build your capital day after day and eventually, you will look up and think “hey I’m pretty good at this” and before long others will notice too.
Cash In Your Career Capital
You have gained career capital when you are considered an expert in your field or a specific role.
This could be as being a top performer in your team, a published author, or an online influencer on a certain topic.
It is now the time to look to cash in that capital and power up to the next level.
A couple of words of warning here:
Do not become so confident in your role that you become complacent and drop the ball.
Do not burn your bridges and step over people to gain that promotion or start your own consultancy to the detriment of your old business.
And remember where it all started and your pursuit of finding work in which you have autonomy, competence and connectedness.
I hear too many stories of people who have stepped over a colleague to get a promotion who then find it difficult to get the remaining team to work effectively.
Or someone who has started their own consultancy forgetting that their old boss will be their main client/competitor and are surprised that they find it difficult to win work.
By all means, be selfish to be selfless in pursuit of your mission. But do it in a way that maintains the three rules of happiness in your work and in a manner that propels your career forward rather than making life difficult for yourself further down the line.
“Be kind to your future self.”
Let’s use me as an example
This is not a copy of my LinkedIn profile, but a look back at my career and how the above has (often unconsciously) influenced my career path so far and what my missions for the future are.
Upon leaving school
When I left school, all I wanted to be was a professional rugby player. Sorry, I’ll rephrase that, I was going to be a professional rugby player. I was the captain of Great Britain U’16’s at the time, I planned to play in the reserves grade for a couple of years, then hit the big time.
At the time rugby would not be a full-time endeavour so rather than getting a job I went to college to study A-Levels in subjects that I was good at or interested in — Information Technology, Business Studies and Maths.
Looking back at my rugby career, I had the mission but I didn’t have enough of a practitioner’s mindset when it come to working on my craft.
I constantly practised and honed my strengths — passing, tackling and kicking. But didn’t take a deliberate practice approach and work on my main weakness — speed out of dummy half.
I did play professionally but at a much lower level than I would have liked to.
As for going to college, this was probably seen as ‘Plan Z’ for me at the time but, in fact, was a great way of building career capital to be used in the future — even if I did make it at rugby it would have come in handy in my 30’s when I retired as a successful rugby player, the qualifications would become useful.
If I am honest I didn’t really put too much effort into my first year at college and was on track to fail my courses. It wasn’t until I met my girlfriend, now wife, in the second year that I took on a deliberate practice approach and got my head down and passed all three of my courses.
One other thing to mention here is related to open doors. When I applied for my chosen university and they found out that I played professional rugby, they offered me an unconditional place on the course of my choice.
Although I made the grades in the end, this was my first sight of an open door. If I didn’t play rugby this offer would not have been on the table.
Upon leaving university
I chose my Business Information Systems subject at university as I thought that e-commerce was going to be the next big thing — this was 2001 so my thinking was correct. Although I managed to pass with a 2:1 at the end of the 3 years, I left with the knowledge that I never wanted to see a computer programming language again.
Additionally, at the time of leaving university, it was clear that I was not going to make a career out of rugby. This gave me the stark realisation that I needed to find a ‘real’ job.
At this point in my life, I had just turned 22, I had no work experience and no job.
Looking back at this time and why I found myself in this position, with some thought I can see that I was lucky. Although I continued to study at university as a Plan Z, it was actually a smart application of deliberate practice.
I was being paid to play rugby during my time at university and I still lived at my parent’s house, therefore it was not really feasible to find get a job. Playing professional team sports was building career capital. But this is something I discovered later down the line.
My first couple of jobs
Even though I didn’t particularly want a long-term career in the computing industry, I found myself applying for jobs that fitted with what I had learned at university.
At the last count, I applied for 90 jobs, only getting 3 interviews and the feedback that I received was that they couldn’t employ me as I had no previous work experience.
It was at this point that I took any job that I could find. The first one was a job in Manchester selling heating insulation door-to-door around Moss Side. What an experience that was!
Luckily, after a couple of weeks of door-knocking, I was offered a job at QVC working in their telephone customer service centre. This was only a temporary job so ended after a couple of months.
It was here, that I started working as a labourer on a building site working with my dad while I searched for a proper job. “I’ve not paid for you to go to uni to work on a building site” my dad would say.
9-months after leaving university I finally landed a real job at the Royal Bank of Scotland.
My 9-months post-university job-seeking phase highlights the importance of career capital as part of your career progression. Regardless of whether you choose to make a change or you are forced into a change, if you have no career capital, you will not be able to progress in your career.
As far as employers were concerned, I was 22 and had never worked a day in my life.
That being said, I did find that it is somehow easier to find work when you are in a job. This is why are say to anybody out of work to find a job, any job and take it. You can quit if it doesn’t work out, but working makes the process of finding a new job easier.
The Banker
Unbelievably, due to my “customer service experience with QVC” I was offered the role of Customer Service Officer (cashier) at RBS in Leyland.
I thrived in the bank. I had a strong work ethic learned playing rugby, with an enthusiasm to learn and put myself on every course available through the bank — which at the time was pretty much anything you want to do.
During my 6 years at the bank, my career path looked like this; CSO > Customer Adviser > Mortgage Adviser > Area Sales Manager > Bank Manager. During my time at the bank, I built skills in customer service, financial products, sales, marketing, management, and leadership.
Around 2008 I could see things starting to go sour in the banking industry so I decided to start to look for other career opportunities.
During this phase of my career, I earned a lot of career capital in an industry that was well respected. And it was after earning this career capital that an open door found me.
Getting Into Nuclear
At the time I started to look for work outside of the Banking Industry, I was still playing semi-professional rugby. I mentioned to a couple of other players on a commute to training that I was looking for a career outside of the bank.
One of the players was undertaking a graduate scheme at Sellafield Ltd and one of the other players mentioned that his uncle also worked at Sellafield Ltd and if I would send him my CV he would pass it on.
Short story, there was an opening for a Junior Commercial Manager to shadow a Commercial Manager with the intention of taking his job in 2 years’ time when he planned to retire.
Due to my career capital of having a degree, working as a Bank Manager, playing professional sports and the open door of the introduction, I was offered the role.
I think that this shows that you do not have to build lots of career capital over many years to progress, but if you focus on your development through deliberate practice, the opportunities will present themselves from places you never imagined.
Nuclear Project Manager
I immediately fell in love with the nuclear industry and all that it stood for. I build a passion for the sector rather than being born with the passion to work in nuclear or even engineering for that fact.
Six months into my new job, the person I was shadowing decided that he was going to work for another 5 years before retiring. This closed the door on one opportunity but by this time I had already decided that I wanted to pursue a career as a project manager as “it just looked like being the captain of a rugby team to me”.
I upskilled by completing the APM course and exam, became a qualified PM and started working as a Project Engineer, then Project Manager, then Senior Project Manager and now Programme Manager.
I really enjoy my work and can honestly say that in the last 15 years I have never once dreaded going to work. It’s the opposite in fact.
It is amazing to look back and see that even though I didn’t realise it at the time, by continuing to work on my career capital through upskilling myself and gaining relevant experience, I have built a decent career in an industry that I am passionate about.
Neither my role, nor the industry that I work in was on my list of potential career paths when I left school, or university for that matter.
I am also, one of those who stumbled into the nuclear industry!
Get Into Nuclear
After about 10 years of working in the nuclear industry, I started to become interested in how I can start to support the industry as a whole. I felt that I owed the industry something.
I love projects and delivery and bringing together a team for the cause of a common goal. But, I didn’t feel experienced enough to start my own project delivery organisation or training company — it is still an aspiration for the future.
At the time I was disappointed by the lack of support for nuclear energy and the lack of interest in people looking to get into nuclear. Due to my varied career path, I was often asked “how did you get into nuclear?” which I could answer, but I found it increasingly frustrating when I struggled to answer questions on how they could get into nuclear.
I decided to set up a website, getintonuclear.com, with the aim of raising the profile of the nuclear industry providing links to where people can find information on where to upskill and where to apply for live jobs.
I never really knew where I was going with this but believed that the details would work themselves out down the line. I naively expected that companies would soon be queuing around the corner to give me money as they were as passionate as I was.
Looking back, I made the same mistake here that I did with rugby after leaving school. I focused too much on what the industry can do for me more than on what I can do (and get paid) for the industry. This is a mistake I’ve been paying for over the last 5 years.
So far, I had always worked hard to build career capital until I had enough to cash in and pursue my next challenge. I have never just dived into something based on an outcome or passion basis. Due to this, I have lacked direction and clarity in what I am doing, and this has led to a failure on my part.
Looking back, it would have been much better to have created a simple blog and focussed on producing articles that provided value to the reader, whilst building my writing skills in the process.
In the meantime, I could have built career capital in areas that I saw would be rare and valuable in the industry — marketing, content creation, social value, career development — and attended/joined as many networking/training groups as I had the time to do so.
In addition to this, I believe that the blog would naturally have built my career capital as someone who is looking to make a change in the sector and would have been just as effective in raising the profile of the nuclear industry and where people can find training courses and live jobs.
The attention from the blog and my upskilling and networking would have opened doors to opportunities to find ways to get paid to solve the problems being faced by the sector.
Instead, I have a website that needs a lot of upkeep although it does have a little bit of attention. However, I am not seen as a practitioner of any rare and valuable skills and I am now in the position that I am the one chasing people to find a route to market.
“What is it you do?” I’m asked.
“Oh, I’m still working it out. A bit of this and that” I reply.
What now for me?
From what I have learned by dissecting my career throughout this series and the interviews I’ve done as part of the career stories section of the Get Into Nuclear website, is that I need to ignore my passions when making decisions about my career.
Instead, I need to put more effort into focusing on building rare and valuable skills and career capital in alignment with my missions. To validate the skills I’m looking to develop I will use money as an indicator of value. If people are not willing to pay for it, it is not a rare and valuable skill.
A Practitioner Mindset career with multiple MissionsRegarding my profession as a Project Manager, my mission is to become the MD/CEO of a major nuclear employer — as an employee or the owner of my own business. This will be achieved by building career capital through deliberate practice and is something that will reward me with a nice salary as it is a valuable role in the industry.
Self-Determination Theory — Tick; Ikigai — Tick;
My belief is that the best way for me to do this is to complete my Chartership as a Project Manager this year whilst continuing to work as a Project Manager in my day job.
I should then have enough career capital to find my way onto a major, significant nuclear project for the next 5 years or so, before looking for a role as a Project/Operations Director.
Once I’ve built 5 years of career capital as an Operations Director, I can focus on creating my own business or becoming MD/CEO of an existing business before I reach the age of 50 —for info, I am turning 40 in 6 months at the time of writing.
With Get Into Nuclear, my mission is to make the business a success in that it supports the whole of the industry by increasing public acceptance and attracting new talent and making a healthy profit. At the moment it takes too much of my time and money.
My longer-term intention has never been for Get Into Nuclear to replace my work as a Project Manager. I have always thought that helping to deliver nuclear projects is where I can add the most value to the industry.
However, I do want to make Get Into Nuclear a success as I genuinely feel that it has a place in supporting the industry. However, based on what we have learned in this series, I cannot act on this feeling alone, I need to focus on finding what the nuclear industry needs help with.
I plan to do this by taking a step back and seeking to find rare and valuable skills that the industry would be willing to pay for. Again, this is not necessarily about the money, but as a validation that the skills are rare and valuable enough for me to invest time in.
This will not be easy to do, but by trying to find businesses that have done something similar, speaking to key influencers in the sector to gain feedback on their major issues and assessing any gaps we have, I should be able to identify valuable business offerings.
I will also consider what, if any, open doors I can find from my existing career capital. Is there an opportunity from within my project management experience or network?
This will give me what I need to work on upskilling, networking and marketing using baby steps, rather than giant leaps, to seek market validation of value.
I will take a couple of weeks to think about and plan what my next moves are. I will certainly keep you posted.
In Summary
The conclusion to all of this is that if you want to find happiness in your professional life (ikigai), don’t start by figuring out your “passion.” Instead, identify some potentially rare and valuable skills, then push yourself to become a practitioner with a single-minded intensity.
It’s only then, once you’ve built career capital, that you’ll be able to find that opportunity in the adjacent possible where your meaningful “mission” hides. Align your Practitioner Driven focus with your Mission
Why can’t you pick a career?
My response is; why do you want to?
Depending upon where you are in your career, pick some skills that you deem to be rare and valuable, either by modelling successful role models or undertaking a skills map and identifying any gaps you have.
Then use deliberate practice to become a practitioner. It is here that you will be presented with a career.
Many of our emails and posts at Get Into Nuclear finish with the statement that “there has never been a better time to get into nuclear”. This is true as there is a huge demand for people in the sector which gives rise to many open doors (that have been closed for decades) for people who have built career capital via skills transferable into the sector.
You may or may not grow passionate about the nuclear industry, but your commitment to your mission to be the best Mechanical Engineer, Electrician, Quality Assurance Manager, Administrator, Marketer or Project Manager will provide you with happiness in your work.
Your career is your path to finding happiness in your working life.
