By: Dr. Don Zytowski
Kuder Director of Research

It has been said that choosing a career is not very different from trying to buy lunch in a foreign country where you’ve never tasted the food and you don’t know the value of the coins in your pocket.

Career planning programs like the Kuder Career Planning System can help young people acquire a sense of what “coins” they have - their skills and preferences - and of the hundreds of possible ways to spend them – careers. Understanding the several different ways that people make decisions can go a long way toward more informed, realistic, and satisfying career choices. A survey of the three ways that decisions are made will shed some light on the process.

Some people decide intuitively. They can’t say exactly why one choice is better than another; they simply feel it. Think of how you buy clothing sometimes. You don’t say, “This coat is two inches too wide in the shoulders, and an inch and a half too short.” That’s the rational method. You just look in the mirror and say, “This doesn’t look good on me.”

The intuitive approach to career choices can make counselors and teachers nervous. There’s a lot at stake. Still, it’s not hard to find people who choose this way and are happy with how it comes out. For example, one of the Person Match sketches in the Kuder system, a chef, says that he began working as a dishwasher in a restaurant when he was thirteen, and continued in the kitchen. At one point he started college, planning to get a degree in marketing, but it “didn’t feel right.” He then decided to enter a culinary school with no opinion sought from others and no careful balancing of pluses and minuses. He now has two restaurants and has co-hosted food shows on radio and television, lectured at universities, and been featured in many gourmet magazines.

Other people seem to want to avoid responsibility for their choice, and take the dependent approach. They ask, “What do you think I should do?” Teachers and counselors can fall prey to this appeal. After all, they have studied the world of work extensively and probably know more about occupations in general than anyone they know. What better than to feel that you’ve solved their problem? But to tell the person what you think they ought to do takes away the opportunity for them to learn how to make their own decisions and plans. A counselor might better help students deal with choices by asking them what resources they have used to find information about their prospects, how confident they are about their skill and interest profiles, and whether they can find some means to validate their scores. Tools to answer all of these are available through the Kuder system.

A variation of the dependent approach is making a choice to please, or at least not to alarm, a significant other or family member. An example I observed of this was a young woman who took an online interest inventory while her boyfriend sat next to her and watched how she responded. As she clicked “most preferred” on one item, I heard him say, softly, “Oh, you don’t want to say that, do you?” And without a word, she changed her answer! Parents often occupy the place of the boyfriend in this story, and reinforce their suggestions by offering or withholding financial support.

The third approach is the analytical; the decision-making method favored by the Kuder system. Two examples of this method within the system are the college and career comparison features. The career comparison section allows the user to select three occupations in order to compare their job descriptions, educational requirements, wages, and job outlook. From this information, the user can assess possible choices as though an investor: what investment of years of school and school expenses does one choice require, how does it pay out, and what are the odds of success? Similarly, the college comparison features allows users to select up to three schools to compare the institution type, student body information, admissions requirements, and tuition and fees in order to make an informed decision.

The problem with the analytical approach is that occupations have real rewards and costs, such as potential income and school expense, but also intangible, emotional rewards and costs, like the opportunity to be promoted and the loss of time for rest and recreation. Is a promotion to junior partner in a law firm enough to compensate for repeated 12 and 14 hour workdays, especially when the decider is likely to have had no real experience with either?

As well, inexperienced decision-makers tend to overlook what economists call “opportunity costs.” For instance, physicians endure not only the costs – tuition fees – of their training, but also the income that they might have made, the opportunity costs, had they graduated from a business school and found a good-paying position four or more years before finishing their medical training. For some undergraduates the most significant opportunity cost of majoring in a demanding curriculum, say engineering, is the crunch it puts on weekend social life.

A complicating factor in the analytical method of decision-making is taking a perfectionistic approach; being unwilling to risk the consequences of a less-than-perfect choice. Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz, in his book, The Paradox of Choice, calls these people “maximizers.” He contrasts them with “satisficers,” who settle for an alternative that is “good enough.” Satisficers know what they want or need and search alternatives until they have found a prospect that meets those wants. Schwartz has found that maximizers do more comparisons of alternatives and take longer to decide than satisficers. So maximizers tend to end up with better outcomes in objective terms – they may succeed in getting higher paying, more prestigious jobs, but they do worse subjectively, never quite believing that they have succeeded – a little less that satisfied with their choice.

In career decisions, the real and opportunity costs associated with a choice may dictate the balance between maximizing and satisficing. Surely if you are “betting” four years of undergraduate biology study on a 50-50 chance (that’s about the actual figure) of getting admitted to veterinary medicine school, you might owe yourself a more careful evaluation of the decision than you would if you elected a BA in business in order to gain entry to a career in the animal health industry.

We have learned that there are three types of methods used to answer the question, “what shall I do?” – intuitive, dependent, and analytical. We believe the analytical method produces the best outcomes, even with the few complications it may pose. Teaching a student how to deal with decisions related to their progression from school to a career can be a counselor’s or teacher’s most valuable contribution to their development. Just be sure to avoid starting a sentence with “You ought to be a …”