What is a Career?
Before we get into a discussion of how to find your role amidst the climate-crisis, it is important to explore some core concepts about career. Working to resolve the climate-crisis is real work. We must take the time to explore our strengths and values to ensure we make informed decisions about our career in order to sustainably support the Earth.
When describing career, CERIC’s Guiding Principles of Career Development defines career as a lifelong process incorporating work, volunteerism, education, and leisure, and more. This means that when people are uncertain about their career, there is often more to consider than just their job. The essence of Career Counselling is determining through conversation what has got a person stuck in life, meeting someone’s challenges with empathy and understanding, and providing helpful reflections and resources in a way that resonates with them. This is why a lot of career guides and advice is ineffective. Individuals are incredibly complex and proposing a single solution for having a good life ignores the uniqueness of the individual. I believe that assessments and resources can be helpful in helping us narrow down options and give us language to more accurately define ourselves, but the moment we come to think of an assessment as an omniscient guide is the moment we suppress our complexity.
The above diagram helps in conceptualizing our career journey. We often see career as a linear process, but in reality it is a cycle without an end or start point. Unfortunately, our society pushes us to consider a career as a singular decision made after graduating high school rather than an ongoing process requiring ongoing action and reflection.
A simple example of this is to take a few moments and think about your past work or volunteer experiences.
What did you like about them?
What did you dislike about them?
Write down your thoughts if you are feeling ambitious.
This self-reflection, as otherwise we find ourselves ricocheting between jobs we dislike. As an example, say a person has the following work history:
Worked in retail which they left (customers sometimes bring their worst selves to the grocery story)
Worked as a server in a restaurant which they left (customers can also bring their worst selves to restaurants)
Worked in a call-centre providing tech support (customers definitely bring their worst selves when alone in their own home)
Putting aside the social inequities that trap people in work and a society that has decided service-level jobs are low-status and low-compensation (a problem I cannot resolve in career counselling, but can be addressed through collective action/activism), the core insight here is that the person does not enjoy working with customers or the public resolving problems. If this same person decides they want to take training in computer science to work in IST, what do you think is going to happen (hint: people aren’t at their best when their computer malfunctions)? With self-reflection we can break this pattern of suffering.
Self-reflection can feel overwhelming if we ask too big a question; we only succeed in making ourselves anxious, discouraged, and coping with Netflix and ice cream. By asking unstructured questions like what what is the meaning of my life (an unhelpful and surprisingly modern question created Thomas Carlyle and German romantics in the 1800’s), we can easily paralyze ourselves in endless reflection, so some structure is important. When making a career decision, we need to consider both Internal and External factors. Internal factors can be examined through self-reflection and include things like our interests, hobbies, health, and personal values. External factors including information on specific jobs, societal forces, family and friends, among others. By considering both, we can feel greater confidence in our career decision.
In the sections that follow, we will examine both these categories.
When examining Internal Factors, I included several sections that will walk you through some of my favorite assessments. I encourage you to take notes and have includes link to workbooks in the comings sections.
For External factors, we will delve into resources for researching occupations and gaining accurate information to make informed decisions. The internet has a tremendous amount of opinions, but it can be difficult to gain factual information about a topic. I have done my best to include unbiased resources that reflect my home of Canada, but also include U.S and International resources too.
Finally, you will have a collection of pages on how to conceptualize the climate-crisis and your career. The reason these are separate as the core career reflection and research skills are required regardless of what you want to do and you will find greater dividends in exploring your role in the climate-crisis.
When you are ready, move on to Assessments.
Tanya’s Story: You will also find a fictional case study, Tanya, in the pages ahead highlighting how the resources can be applied to an individual to help identify career options.
Tanya is twenty-one years old and has been concerned with the climate-crisis since she was twelve. Wanting to keep her options open and feeling that being good at science is required to help the environment, she studied chemistry, calculus, physics and biology, computer science and math in high school. She managed to get through the courses and got A grades, but found the topics boring and points to her concern for the environment being the primary motivator to study the sciences.
Tanya is organized and always has a to-do list as well as loves learning new things and going beyond the Wikipedia article. She enjoyed collaborating with others in high school group work and frequently took on roles coordinating others, though she disliked the idea of being a “manager.” She has a love of politics and frequently reads local and global news.
She has worked several jobs including retail customer service, as a restaurant server, and as an office clerk as summer jobs for a government office. She has also volunteered to help plan events with a local environmental non-profit focusing on tree conservation and as well as update databases and canvas for a local politician.
She wants to help out with the climate-crisis but is unsure whether to pursue sciences and if this is the only way to help the environment.