CERIC is Toronto-based charity that is advancing career development in Canada. As Chair of the Board of Directors, I have spent the last few weeks speaking with career practitioners, policymakers, business leaders, and journalists about the profound regret that many Canadians experience about their careers. According to our survey of career practitioners, nearly 72% of Canadians who met with a career professional wished they had chosen a different career path. Over 67% of Canadians felt pressured into choosing a career path they didn’t want and over half of Canadians wished they hadn’t “played it safe”. How might you navigate around or through these fairly staggering statistics? Here are five ways to avoid career regret.
Take the long view
The dying have a lot to say about regrets of work and life. According to The Guardian’s Susie Steiner, who interviewed a palliative-care-nurse-turned-author about countless end-of-life conversations, the most common regret of her patients was not having “the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The second greatest regret was “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
By taking the long view and imagining the end of life reflections you want to have you will be more likely to make career decisions that serve your interests and, hopefully, greater purpose. Considering what happens at the end of our lives can help us crystallize all kinds of decision making in the present and mitigate our natural bias for favouring the safe or secure thing right instead of taking a calculated risk.
Have an infinite mindset
I’m about halfway through Simon Sinek’s latest book, The Infinite Game, and the thing about your career is that it’s not a finite game like basketball (although there are leadership and organizational development lessons to be learned from that particular sport!). Basketball has rules and each game has a clear winner and loser. The world of work has always been changing and even when there are rules people break them. Folks who are constantly adapting their expectations, ideas and skills to manage their career over time are less likely to experience feelings of regret.
“Winning” a job interview process reflects a finite approach to career development – getting the job is the end of it in this case. Imagining your career as an evolving and adaptive experience that goes on forever fosters agility and resilience. When we are comfortable with changes that are thrust upon us, like economic downturns, bad career advice from parents, or long-term illness, as well as changes we influence, like promotions or changing jobs, then we are probably thinking infinitely.
Learn to learn
The most important capability that you can build is the ability to learn. Being open to new ideas and cultivating savviness for using platforms, peers and unconventional tools to learn human and technical skills will keep you relevant and interested as work and your career evolves.
In addition to what’s commonly called “learning agility”, your career development will benefit from you being good at these things, too:
- Coping: resilience is measured by how we recharge and bounce back when things change.
- Intercultural understanding: work has been globalized and we collaborate across cultures and styles more than ever before and it will continue, especially in Canada.
- Digital fluency: being able to understand and navigate different kinds of technology is critical when so much work is being augmented, enhanced and disrupted by automation.
Interrogate your influencers
Parents and peers are the most common givers of career advice. Teachers/professors, media and “the Internet” are also commonly cited as influencers on our career decision-making. In order to avoid making decisions that reflect someone else’s agenda, really interrogate the folks giving you career advice. This is important because your peers have the same information as you do (especially if you’re a twentysomething grad student reading this article) and parents often give advice based on their experience, which is very different from today’s reality.
Asking questions like “what data or labour market trends are supporting this idea?” or “where did you hear/read that [INSERT ROLE] is stable?” or “what biases might be at play here?” can help foster reflection and introspection in a parent or friend who keep telling you to become a crime scene investigator. Ultimately, if your support network is telling you what to do more than asking you questions then you should probably take their advice with several grains of salt.
Engage experts
Career practitioners – coaches, advisors, counsellors, educators – bring a variety of human and digital skills to conversations and tools that make navigating the world of work easier and more engaging. The ability to facilitate clients’ self-discovery in alignment with strong labour market information is just one reason that career practitioners are well-positioned to not only help you avoid career regret, but also help you realize your potential. Here’s a great perspective from Challenge Factory’s Taryn Blanchard on the Cannexus20, the largest career development conference in Canada:
The world of work is changing in ways that are both exciting and scary. “Career” is a loaded and lifelong endeavor, and it’s only getting more complicated. But if I learned anything at Cannexus20 and during my plunge into the field of career development, it’s that the cornerstones which make us human—hey, like community and storytelling!—offer all the pathways to success and fulfillment that we need.
When more of us have engaging and meaningful careers our communities are more likely to thrive and prosper for the long term.