What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do

I appreciate being included in LinkedIn's #YouAsked series. Here is a common and truly difficult question posed by Richard Young Jun Kim

“There are so many industries to be a part of, mentors to work for and learn from, and skills to acquire. How does someone in their early 20's navigate through that? Is that lack of decisiveness coming from a lack of experience or does it attribute to an eclectic mind? How would you go about this?”

This is one of the most consistent and challenging questions for a large swath of people in their 20's trying to figure out their careers. To answer it and start taking action, you need to understand that there are three different types of career paths and it’s important to recognize which one you’ll be pursuing. In this way you can set your expectations and plan your actions accordingly:

1. The Straight Shot

The “straight shot” is a highly structured career path characterized by specialized education, certifications, and clear steps unfolding over years. While straight shot positions are often challenging to break into, such as becoming a doctor, an architect, or a pilot, once you’re on the path, it’s the most straightforward on which to continue.

2. The Specialist

The “specialist” is typified by extreme competition and very challenging to break into, but once you’re in and performing well on this path, an organization typically carries you forward and as you progress you get additional responsibilities, broader exposure, steadily higher compensation, and opportunities to manage others. This is also frequently the path from which other companies will recruit you to do for them what you’ve been doing for your current company. Examples include engineering, IT, finance and investing, management consulting, and marketing.

3. The Winding Path

The “winding path”, which is increasingly common for many young professionals and recent grads, is arguably the most challenging. You know you are on this path if you cannot honestly and succinctly answer the question, “So what do you want to do?” This is an especially difficult question because you've always been a person with broad interests, diverse academic, internship, and prior work experiences. When you're on the winding path, you will typically find it tricky, and anxiety producing, to project forward how your individual interests and strengths can be applied to jobs and careers that you know you're probably not even aware of.

The key to successfully navigating the winding career path is to take action and gain new experiences, whether seemingly logical in the near term or not. As you move from project or job to job, in a seemingly random order, you create the opportunities for exposure, connections, and experience that will allow you to become more specialized later, when you find the environment and role that clicks for you. The winding career path is the one that only make sense in retrospect. A key advantage of taking action without trying to overthink it that you build your story along the way, picking up insights and anecdotes that you use to explain to others what you’ve been up to. The key principle for success on the winding path is to not overthink things, take action, get that next step and figure it out from there.

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