Jump Start Your Career Search
Five tips to help you get started
10/6/20266 min read
Are you wondering what to do next? We don’t always get to choose when we search for a new career. Maybe you just finished school and the path forward isn’t as clear as you expected. Maybe you’re in a job that’s fine, but you find yourself watching the clock more than the work. Maybe something happened — a layoff, a restructuring, a moment where you looked up and realized the career you’d been building is being quietly dismantled by forces that have nothing to do with your competence or effort.
Maybe you’re a parent or a teacher watching someone you care about spin their wheels, and you’re wondering how to help without being pushy. You’re probably wondering if AI is going to entirely change the workplace landscape. How do you compete with a “superintelligence”?
Career exploration isn’t something you do once, in high school, with a guidance counselor or an online worksheet. As someone who has changed careers multiple times, I have learned to always be aware of career possibilities. Technology and the economy shift our prospects, but so do age, health, relationships, and luck. It’s easier to face these changes if you’ve been tracking on career options throughout your life. I have some thoughts on how to do that.
The first tip is to develop the art of visualizing the future, and you can start practicing it anywhere, for free, right now.
Next time you’re in a grocery store, try this: instead of just shopping, look at the store as a system. Where did everything on those shelves come from? Someone drove it here in a truck — that’s logistics and transportation. Someone designed the shelving layout to maximize what you buy — that’s retail psychology and store planning. Someone wrote the database that generates those little price tags with the weights and product codes — that’s information systems. Someone negotiated the contracts with the suppliers — that’s procurement and supply chain management. Someone designed the refrigeration units — that’s mechanical engineering.
That’s just the grocery store. You can do this anywhere; in a hospital, a construction site, a restaurant, a tech company, an airport. Every functioning organization is an ecosystem of careers, most of which are invisible until you start looking for them.
The goal isn’t to find your dream job in the produce section. It’s to train yourself to see work differently — as a landscape of possibilities rather than a list of job titles.
The second tip is to think about what you want from work before you think about what work you want to do. This sounds backwards, but it isn’t. Most people start a career search by looking at job listings and asking “could I do that?” A better question is “would I want to?” In order to answer that, you need to know something about yourself first.
Some useful comparisons to start with: Do you prefer working indoors or outdoors? Do you like working with your hands, or primarily with information and ideas — or both? Do you work better alone or as part of a team? Do you thrive on routine and predictability, or do you need variety and constant change? Do you want to see the immediate physical results of your work, or are you comfortable with longer feedback loops?
I have a friend who struggled with finishing projects. She just quit bothering before the job was completed. She finally got a job that was not project-based—with ongoing tasks but no deadlines—and she thrived. Personally, I like the rhythm of projects. I like the thrill of starting, the pride of problem-solving, and the satisfaction of completion. Recognizing your work style can help guide you to jobs that are a better fit for you personally.
There are no right answers. A person who needs to be outdoors and moving will be miserable in a cubicle regardless of how good the salary is. A person who needs quiet and concentration will struggle in a high-energy customer-facing role. Knowing your own operating conditions is not a luxury — it’s the foundation of a sustainable career.
Once you have a sense of your categories, you can use them as filters. Do the jobs you find interesting consistently share certain characteristics? That’s useful information.
The third tip is to use the career exploration tools that actually exist — and there are some readily available.
The U.S. Department of Labor has a free online tool called the O*NET Interest Profiler. It’s sixty questions, it takes about fifteen minutes, and it gives you a profile of your work-related interests mapped against actual occupations. It’s not magic and it’s not the last word — but it’s a bit of a starting point and it’s free. You can find it at onetcenter.org.
Beyond that, the landscape of career exploration tools has expanded significantly. Indeed is now a significant tool — not just for job searching but for understanding what careers actually look like from the inside. Following people on LinkedIn who work in fields you’re curious about gives you a ground-level view that no job description can provide. Informational interviews — asking someone if you can have a thirty-minute conversation about their work — can be really helpful if you can find someone who is already doing something you find interesting.
AI tools can be useful for brainstorming career options, drafting application materials, and researching industries, but be thoughtful about how you use them. A career search that’s entirely mediated by AI tools will tell you a lot about what careers look like on paper — and not much about whether they’d actually suit you.
The fourth tip is to use job listings as research tools — not just for job applications.
Job boards like Indeed, LinkedIn, and ZipRecruiter are useful even when you’re not ready to apply for anything. Read job descriptions in fields you’re curious about. Notice what skills keep appearing. Notice what qualifications are required versus preferred, and notice what the day-to-day responsibilities actually look like versus whatever glamorous version of the job you had in your head.
Keep a running list of job titles that interest you. Search the same titles again in a month — the listings change constantly, and sometimes the right opportunity appears at the wrong moment, and then reappears six months later when the timing is better.
Also notice salary ranges when they’re listed. Many jurisdictions now require employers to post salary ranges. This is useful information not just for negotiation but for understanding the economic reality of a field before you invest years of training in it.
One thing is certain: the job market is being reshaped by AI faster than most career advice can keep up with. Some roles that seemed secure three years ago look different now. Some entirely new roles have emerged. The fields most likely to remain valuable are those that combine technical knowledge with human judgment, physical presence, relational skill, or creative problem-solving. Machines are good at pattern recognition and information processing. They’re considerably less good at everything that requires being a person.
The fifth tip is the oldest one and still the most effective: talk to people who are already doing work that interests you. Not to ask for a job—just to learn.
Most people, when asked thoughtfully and respectfully, are willing to talk about their work. What do they like about it? What surprised them? What do they wish they’d known earlier? What does a typical day actually look like — not the LinkedIn version, the real version? YouTube also has videos about almost any career you might be considering. Some of them will actually attempt to show you “a day in the life.”
These conversations do something that no aptitude test or job listing can do: they give you access to the texture of a career. You might learn about the frustrations that don’t make it into the job description, or even the unexpected satisfactions.
If you find someone willing to mentor you — to take an interest in your development and share their knowledge over time — that relationship is priceless. Look for those people, and be worth their investment.
If someone gives you a lead or a referral — follow up. Promptly. This is more important than it sounds. People who give referrals are extending their own reputation on your behalf. Following up promptly and keeping them informed of what happened is both courteous and strategically smart.
Our early jobs probably won’t be our final destination, and they don’t need to be. A job that turns out to be wrong teaches us something real about what we actually need, which is information we couldn’t have gotten any other way. A difficult manager teaches us what bad leadership looks like, which helps us recognize good leadership when we find it. A workplace that feels “off” teaches us to trust that instinct.
The career search is a process, not an event. It doesn’t end when we get a job — it just pauses while we gather more information from the inside. Be curious about the world even after you get a job, because there is usually a “next” job somewhere on the horizon.
