What Color Is Your Parachute? (51 page)

Just make sure that you get the names of at least
two
careers, or jobs, that you think you could be happy doing. Never, ever, put all your eggs in one basket. The secret of surviving out there in the jungle is
having alternatives.

Be careful. Be thorough. Be persistent. This is your life you’re working on, and your future. Make it glorious. Whatever it takes, find out the name of your ideal career, your ideal occupation, your ideal job—
or jobs.

Before you think of individual places where you might like to work, it is necessary to stop and think of all the
kinds
of places where one might get hired.

Let’s take an example. Suppose in your new career you want to be a teacher. You must then ask yourself:
what kinds of places hire teachers?
You might answer,
“just schools”
—and finding that schools in your geographical area have no openings, you might say,
“Well, there are no jobs for people in this career.”

But wait a minute! There are countless other
kinds
of organizations and agencies out there, besides schools, that employ
teachers
. For example, corporate training and educational departments, workshop sponsors, foundations, private research firms, educational consultants, teachers’ associations, professional and trade societies, military bases, state and local councils on higher education, fire and police training academies, and so on and so forth.

“
Kinds
of places” also means places with different
hiring options
, besides full-time, such as:

• places that would employ you part-time (maybe you’ll end up deciding to hold down two or even three part-time jobs, which altogether would add up to one full-time job, in order to give yourself more variety);
  

• places that take temporary workers, on assignment for one project at a time;
  

• places that take consultants, one project at a time;
  

• places that operate primarily with volunteers, etc.;
  

• places that are nonprofit;
  

• places that are for-profit;
  

• and, don’t forget, places that you yourself could start up, should you decide to be your own boss (see
  chapter 9
  ).
  

Don’t forget that as you talk to workers about their jobs or careers (in the previous section), they may accidentally volunteer information about hiring options. Listen keenly, and take notes.

As you interview workers about their jobs or careers, they will probably innocently mention actual names of organizations that have such jobs—plus what’s good or bad about the place. This is important information for you. Jot it all down. Keep notes
as though it were part of your religion.

Now when this name-gathering is all done, what do you have? Well, either you’ll have
too few name s
of places to work, or you’ll end up with
too much information
—too many names of places that hire people in the career that interests you. There are ways of dealing with either of these eventualities. We’ll take this last scenario, first.

To avoid ending up with the names of too many places, you will want to
cut down the territory
, so you are left with
a manageable number
of
“
targets” to research and visit.
⁷

Let’s take an example. Suppose you discover that the career that interests you the most is
welding
. You want to be a welder. Well, that’s a beginning. You’ve cut the 23 million U.S. job-markets down to:

• I want to work in a place that hires welders.
  

But the territory is still too large. There might be thousands of places in the country, that use welders. You can’t go visit them all. So, you’ve got to cut down the territory, further. Suppose that on your geography petal you said that you really want to live and work in the San Jose area of California. That’s helpful: that cuts down the territory further. Now your goal is:

• I want to work in a place that hires welders, within the San Jose area.
  

But, the territory is still too large. There could be 100, 200, 300 organizations that fit that description. So you look at your Flower Diagram for further help, and you notice that under
working conditions
you said you wanted to work for an organization with fifty or fewer employees. Good, now your goal is:

• I want to work in a place that hires welders, within the San Jose area, that has fifty or fewer employees.
  

This territory may still be too large. So you look again at your Flower Diagram for further guidance, and you see that you said you wanted to work for an organization that works with, or produces, wheels. So now your statement of what you’re looking for, becomes:

• I want to work in a place that hires welders, within the San Jose area, has fifty or fewer employees, and makes wheels.
  

Using your Flower Diagram, you can thus keep cutting down the territory, until the
“targets”
of your job-hunt are no more than ten places. That’s a manageable number of places for you to
start with.
You can always expand the list later, if none of these ten turns out to be promising or interesting.