Stumped for a career direction?

Try asking yourself these ten self-assessment questions. If you run into difficulties ask friends and family for an honest appraisal of these factors.

There’s no magic formula, the answers won’t reveal your working future, but they will help you clarify matters and give you the insights you’ll need to choose a degree programme that plays to your strengths.

What are my favourite subjects?

It may sound like an obvious starting point, but you’d be surprised at the number of people who sign up for courses that don’t interest them.

Don’t spend the rest of your life, or at least the next few years, slaving over something that you find boring.

You’ll get a lot more out of higher education and your subsequent career if you work in an area you enjoy. If you think medicine sounds interesting then go for it, if it sends you to sleep, avoid it.

What are my academic achievements?

Take a look at your high school career. What subjects were you best at? To some extent your exam results will answer this question, but results might not accurately reflect your long-term performance.

Where did you consistently get good marks? You may have won a prize, come top or near the top of the class. You may have used your skills to tutor younger or weaker students in a subject area. Was there a subject where your friends asked you for homework help or recognised you as an expert?

What else turns me on?

What really excites your interest? What do you choose to do when you don’t have to do anything? Is there something that you love to do, perhaps it is a hobby or other leisure activity that you look forward to? In many cases these activities can form the basis of a career.

For example, if you love animals, think of veterinary science; if you enjoy spending time with computers then consider a career in information technology. Some connections are less obvious, if you enjoy tinkering with a car you may be suited to work as a computer engineer.

Am I creative?

You may like to express yourself through words, art, music or other artistic format. But there’s more to creativity than creative arts: businesses need creative thinking and the best scientists, engineers and mathematicians generally have a strong creative streak. It’s important to answer this question honestly.

It’s hard to accept a lack of creativity but this is not necessary a weakness; in some disciplines creativity is regarded with suspicion, think what the term “creative accountant” means.

Do I have good communications skills?

How good are you at expressing all those brilliant thoughts that pass through your head? Can you put them down on paper or speak about them in a way that makes things easy to understand or do you struggle? Could you stand in front of a group of people and explain a complex idea? How about a hall filled with hundreds of people?

Communications isn’t a one-way street, it’s just as important to listen to others and to use feedback.

How do I rate my people skills?

Although people skills are closely related to communication skills, there are differences. If you’re a good communicator you can relay or receive ideas, if you have good people skills you can pick up on feelings or mood. You also need to understand what motivates people and why they act in certain ways. Dealing with conflict is important. Knowing when to ask a subordinate to do a task is as important as knowing how to explain the mechanics of the task.

Is money important to me?

The best things in life are free, but cash can buy an awful lot of second-best things.

Ask yourself if  material rewards motivate you or if other things are more important. For example, you may want a career where you can help to make the world better, brighter or safer. Of course, with student loan debts and sky-high housing costs, you may feel you don’t have much choice but to take the money and run. If you’re not motivated by money, you’ll have a lot more interesting career option.

Do I need structure?

School life is highly structured, with timetabled lessons, strict hierarchies and so on, but university and the adult world of work isn’t always like that. Many people thrive in an unstructured environment and do their best work where there are fewer restrictions. Others are lost without a rule book. This is an area where you may change over time, but ask yourself if you feel safer on a highly structured course or if you’re ready to cut loose.

Am I internally or externally driven?

Some people are self-motivated. They can get up and work hard for long hours without anyone saying anything to them. They will make their own decisions about what to do and how to complete tasks. Other people need external motivating. This can take the form of a highly disciplined workplace in say the armed forces or it can come from colleagues operating in a team.

You’ll need self-motivation to get through university, but the quality is essential if you plan to work for yourself at a later date.

Can I put off my career decision?

There’s a lot of pressure on young people to make hard and fast decisions about their careers before they embark on a university degree. Some people feel comfortable with this; others are not ready to choose at this stage.

The good news is that you don’t have to make a firm commitment yet. Many university departments offer generalised degree programmes within a certain discipline. In most cases you can wait until the end of your first year before selecting a major subject. Other universities offer liberal studies degrees and BA programmes that will keep your employment options open.

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How many hours will you work in your lifetime? This may sound like a meaningless question, yet it is far from irrelevant. Reaching an answer to the question will shed a great deal of light on what is happening to the knowledge workforce in general and the shape of your personal future working life in particular.

In his book, The Age of Unreason, Charles Handy writes that for his generation, that is people who started their working lives in the 1950s, the average work life expectancy was around 100,000 hours.

Handy reached this figure because he says employers expected the average Northern European working the 1950s to put in 47 hours of paid work and paid or unpaid overtime each week. In those days people could expect to have around five weeks paid holiday each year, making a working year of 47 weeks. Back then Northern European professional workers could expect to enjoy more or less full employment from leaving school at roughly 18 years until retirement at 65. Give or take a few percent this works out at 100,000 hours.

Rapid changes in European employment

By the time Handy wrote his book in the mid-1980s, the European employment scene had changed radically. I won’t go into all the arguments here – Handy’s book is definitely worth reading if you haven’t already discovered it. Basically Handy argued that the time a person could expect to spend in the core workforce had reduced to some 50,000 hours over a lifetime.

He found that amount of annual work leave remained at roughly 47 weeks. At the time employers expected most European professionals to work 45 hours a week. Although by the 1980s people were no longer expected to show up at the office on a Saturday morning, the average working day was longer. By the 1980s, fewer professionals were paid overtime. All the hours in excess of the 38 to 40 hours normally quoted in contracts would be unpaid overtime.

The big difference came in the number of years worked. Skilled workers and professionals not only required a first university degree, but increasingly employers were asking for a vocational qualification as well.

Things vary from country to country, but in the mid-1980s young European knowledge workers didn’t enter the workforce much before their early 20s. At the same time, the trend towards early retirement meant that few professionals worked past the age of 55.

In fact Handy argues that the pressure and stress of work meant few people in the ‘core’ workforce would want to stay in their jobs much past their 50^th birthday. Calculate the numbers and you’ll see how Handy reached his estimate of 50,000 hours (roughly 25 years by 47 weeks by 45 hours).

Not as easy as it looks

At first sight you might imagine this means the 1980s workforce had it easy compared with their fathers (that’s not sexist face it, statistically speaking not many mothers married to professional men worked during in the 1950s). It would have been easy if the world stayed as it was during the early 1980s.

But the world didn’t stay like that for long. Today we could take another look at Handy’s numbers and reach a very different conclusion.

First, the length of the practical working life is even shorter. While many knowledge workers can continue in full employment well into their sixth or seventh decade, few core employers want workers much past their mid-40s. In other words, the period you can expect to stay in the core workforce is now around 20 years, roughly from the age of 25 to 45.

The working week has stretched back again. Our fathers may have fought for the right to a 40-hour week, but today’s average Australian full-time employee is turning in around 47 hours, often with no overtime payment.

This figure is for all workers. I can’t find hard and fast statistics, but there are still plenty of unionised jobs where the working week is kept in the 37 to 40 hour range. This means many knowledge workers are averaging more than 47 hours.

For the sake of argument (and easy arithmetic) we’ll assume a 50-hour week is normal in Australia. And as this Department of Labour report shows, if anything New Zealand knowledge workers put in an even longer working week – and with fewer leave days.

Holidays are history

Perhaps the most disturbing trend is that few knowledge workers get to have any real holiday any more. Although many jobs have a nominal amount of annual leave, in practice few people ever get to take all their leave. In my last formal job I had four weeks leave a year, when I left after two years I was paid six weeks salary in lieu of unused holiday. I know from talking to people, this is commonplace – most people move jobs fairly regularly so they cop unused holiday as a cash payment.

In some cases people don’t take leave because they worry things might happen in their absence. Others worry that by not being in place, their bosses might realise they are disposable. More commonly the pressure of work and thin staffing levels means that people simply can’t get adequate cover to take time off.

Despite this, most people manage to grab a week or so around Christmas and a few days break here and there. Typically a modern Australian or New Zealand knowledge worker might enjoy the arithmetically convenient total of two weeks leave, or a working year of 50 weeks.

That gives us a total of 50 by 50 by 20 or 50,000 hours. In other words, most people are cramming the same amount of working hours into a shorter number of years.

However in my opinion there are two major differences between the modern working life and the situation that Handy described in the 1980s.

Higher education is no picnic

First, today’s higher education is no picnic. Sure people had to work at learning in the 1970s and early 80s, but people had the luxury of choosing courses that were interesting and not those leading to a career. It’s one thing to study when the subject is fascinating, it’s another thing to plough through dry vocational course matter. Furthermore, educational resources are stretched and there’s less money for students. Consequently many people have to slave at minimal wage jobs while studying.

Like I say, it is no picnic. Any calculation of lifetime working hours should add around 48 hours a week for a 48 week year for each year spent in higher education. If you take a first degree and a vocational postgrad course that could be a total of 16,000 hours devoted to the educational system.

Second, although people in the core workforce are better paid than in the past, higher tax rates and higher costs associated with working and getting educated mean that few people can earn enough during their more productive years to take them through the rest of their lives. In other words, most knowledge workers need to work long past their use-by date. You can cut the numbers how you like, but each way I do the calculations I reach the same conclusion: today’s knowledge workers can expect to spend at least 100,000 hours at work.

That’s pretty much the same as people faced in the 1950s.

See also:
Must read books: The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy

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Image by AditChandra via Flickr

Investing in higher education would boost the Australian economy more than tax cuts or pouring government money into industry. That’s the verdict of a KPMG report commissioned by Australia’s universities, who, let’s face it, stand to gain the most from an investment in higher education.

The numbers look good. According to the report Australia’s average annual GDP could climb by an extra A$1.6 billion over the next ten years. Reaching an annual average of A$38 billion by the 2020s.

Those benefits depend on Australia’s federal government following the recommendations made in a higher education review (The Bradley Review). Bradley recommended spending A$6.5 billion on higher education over four years, then spending the OECD average of one percent of GDP in each following year.

KPMG says while the cost is modest, the pay-off would be unusually large.

Last week’s Australian federal government budget spending commitment to higher education fell well short of the amount recommended.

See:

New report shows university reforms will drive growth

Despite the global financial crisis, Australia and New Zealand still face a shortage of many key information technology skills. And many experts believe that shortage will be even more acute three or four years from now when today’s school students finish tertiary education. So if you’re looking for a solid career with long term prospects, it could be right for you.

Here are ten ways to improve your IT career prospects:

1. Choose your undergraduate course carefully. In particular, look for university departments that have close industry links and a culture or track record of high graduate employment levels. These factors are more import than an institution’s wider reputation. University admissions departments often have this kind of information. If they are unwilling to answer questions on these subjects that may be because they perform poorly in these areas.
2. If you are still at school, choose courses that align with the entry requirements of the best undergraduate departments. Make sure you do plenty of relevant groundwork before University; this will help your grades later. Don’t neglect English or Commerce – both are highly valued by technology employers.
3. Hone your communications skills. If possible take school or undergraduate courses in writing and verbal communications. Take out-of-school opportunities to improve public speaking and similar skills. Many junior IT jobs require you to work on help desks and in similar places where you are dealing with customers (who may be inside or outside of the organisation you work for).
4. Learn to look professional. Develop an appropriate dress style. Know how to put on a tie and polish shoes. This doesn’t necessarily mean dark blue business suits. It does mean being presentable.
5. Start thinking like a professional. Make a habit of being punctual and well mannered. Take a pride in every thing you do. Employers say this is where most otherwise good candidates miss out. But none of this means you have to become old before your time.
6. Maintain an interest in IT that goes beyond narrow specialty skills. Read trade publications and web sites. This will give you something to talk about at interviews and an early warning of employment trends.
7. Once you are in the work force, keep your skills up-to-date. If your employer offers any training or refresher options take as many as you can manage. If necessary learn new skills in your own time.
8. Think marketing. You need to sell yourself and sell your skills. Make sure your CV or resume puts you in the best possible light. But don’t overdo it.
9. Network extensively with colleagues, friends in associated industries and keep in touch with employment consultants – not all job vacancies are formally advertised. Use social networking tools. Find ways to network that suit your personality without looking creepy or pushy.
10. If you have the option, consider finishing your degree and starting your career in the US or UK. Employers in those countries are more likely to employ fresh graduates and you’ll have no trouble finding work when you return to the antipodes.

It’s a pity Brian Corrigan’s Opportunities still there for graduates is behind The Australian Financial Review’s paid content wall. The story, which was the lead item in the AFR’s Information section in the print edition of today’s paper, is well worth reading and deserves a wider audience.

Corrigan reports that after years of declining enrolments, student numbers are climbing once again for information technology and computer science courses at Australia’s universities. It appears people are using the recession to gain skills. That’s a smart move. Earning money is difficult right now. The cost of an education is the same as it was before the financial meltdown, but many other costs associated with studying are lower. So are interest rates, which makes taking a student loan easier.

There are quotes from Sydney’s University of Technology which has seen postgraduate IT student numbers rise 25 percent this year. At Queensland University of Technology student numbers climbed 10 percent after falling every year since 2002 after the dotcom bust. In the mid 2000s I wrote stories for the AFR about technology courses in higher education. At the time there was a fear courses would close  due to lack of demand despite industry’s need for trained IT workers.

Further down his story Corrigan says there’s still a healthy demand for workers with computer qualifications in Australia. The recession and falling overall employment has barely touched the tech sector with 10 percent fewer tech employers turning up at job fairs. This would compare with there being next to zero potential employers looking for recruits in other industries.

Further good news appears in Australian IT, where Fran Foo wrote about a rise in the number of computer related scholarships on offer in Scholarships defy crisis. She quotes ACS Foundation executive director John Ridge, who said about 20 new companies had started offering scholarships in the past six months even though the economy had turned south. Interestingly, Satyam numbers among the companies offering scholarships.

It’s not directly related, but Jennifer Foreshew’s Overseas hunt for 200 with IT skills also in today’s Australian IT underlines the message that tech workers with the right stuff are not doing it as tough as everyone else these days. In fact, Peoplebank Australia is planning to import between 150 and 200 tech workers this year.

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