Find Your Career ‘Sound’

Imagine a studio soundboard — that big deck of knobs and sliders that sound technicians use to mix each track into the best sounding music.

What if you could do that to your job — tune aspects of it until the harmony it created was an exact match for your soul?

Of course, I’m not giving you a free ticket into whatever CEO chair you want, but I am going to help you dig deep in yourself to determine if a CEO chair is what you even want.

I want you to start by forgetting specific jobs, specific companies, or specific people you sit next to on the bus whose lives and outfits you think you want to steal. We need to operate from a clean slate.

Now, we’re going to brainstorm a bunch of job attributes that will become your own personal career-sound. For example, an easy one is Pay. It becomes one of your sliders, and you can move it from high to low. Let’s go ahead and put that all the way up to maximum. Great, this is easy.

Next let’s pick some more. Commute. Easy again — set that one to zero. But let’s get more interesting. What about Peer-dependence — how much your work requires teams or others — with a slider from lone wolf to constant peer interaction. That’s more interesting. Let’s add internal vs. external-facing, technical vs business, individual contributor vs manager, and creative vs logical. Ah, now we’re starting to get some unique sound!
Here’s some other ideas, but you can come up with dozens or even hundreds:

• Cause-driven vs cause-agnostic
• Big company vs small company
• High-autonomy vs directed
• Brand-name vs unknown
• Specific location vs any location
• Stock or bonus-incentive compensation vs predictable paychecks
• Indoor vs outdoor
• High risk vs low risk
• Ambiguous problems vs clear orders
• Dynamic career path vs clear career progression
• High-learning vs walk-in-the-park
• Casual vs professional
• Pioneering new ground vs improving upon something
• Minimal time commitments vs 100 hour weeks
• High visibility vs back office

Now you’ve got yourself a sound that’s completely yours. You can look at the specific combinations of traits you’ve created and compare job prospects against them.

Ah, but now you’re seeing that no job fits your sound perfectly (unless you’re just that lucky, which is great for you).

We’ve got to go back on the traits we’ve brainstormed and begin to pick what’s critical, important, or just nice-to-have.

Let’s rank all the traits on your list by Most Important to Least Important. After great agonizing between things like high-pay vs. cause-driven, you’ll have a clear ranking of what you want and how important what you want is.

Now, when you’re looking for jobs, you can ask recruiters or employees questions that help you determine how well those jobs’ day-to-day activities fit your personal career sound. But instead of asking, “what’s a typical day like?” you can ask, “Does this role have a lot of autonomy and external visibility?” That’s the kind of question that shows you’re thinking critically, and the answer is something you can use to make a decision.

Now, you might be early in your career, in which case you’ll probably need to plot a path between your ideal job and the jobs that tend to lead to it. Or you’ll find that after a few years, you’ve changed your mind about what you want, or how important certain job aspects are. In fact, that will definitely happen. But at least you’ve got grounding in who you are right now, not just what seems cool on TV.

Congratulations, you’re now a certified Career Sound Technician!

Remember, wisdom comes not from knowing the world, but from knowing yourself. I hope this helped you wise up today.