Making your plan and putting it into action: Part 12 How to make career decisions

Many decisions — like what to eat for dinner or which socks to wear — aren’t worth taking much time over. Career decisions, however, can determine how you’ll spend years of your life, and so justify weeks of careful work. But they can also easily feel paralysing.

“Should I quit my current job?” “Which job offer should I accept?” “Where should I be aiming longer-term?” By now you may have some idea about what you’d like to do in your career, but what happens when the time comes to commit and make a choice?

There have been decades of research in cognitive psychology into how to improve decision making.¹ Based on these insights, we’ve identified four common decision-making mistakes and created a step-by-step process to avoid them.

While perhaps the most frequently used technique for making career decisions is to make a pros and cons list, the research we’ve seen suggests it misses out on the most powerful ways to improve your decisions.

Reading time: 10 minutes

Step 1: generate more options

What’s the most important insight from the science of decision making? The Stanford psychologist Chip Heath and his brother Dan wrote a book summarising what’s been learned. Their conclusion was that the biggest “villain of decision making” is narrow framing: considering an overly narrow range of options, priorities, and potential futures. In other words, people aren’t so bad at comparing two options based on a set of criteria. The real risk is that there was a third option that was even better but which they never even thought of.

Several studies have found ‘whether or not’ decisions — those that only consider a single option — were much less likely to be judged successful than those where several options were compared side by side.²

All this suggests a very simple way to improve your decisions, which is also the Heath brothers’ top recommendation: always try to generate more options. From our experiences giving career advice, we agree. In fact, many of the most fruitful conversations we’ve had with advisees have begun with them wondering, “Should I do A or B?” and ended with listing options C, D, and E — all of which seemed a better use of their skills. Usually, time spent generating more options is among the most useful things you can do.

This makes sense because the cost of accidentally ruling out a great option too early is much greater than the cost of investigating a bit further. And because success is so hard to predict, it’s easy to accidentally rule out something that could have been great.

A common mistake is to think you need to stick narrowly to your current field. For example, people often think that because they studied biology, they should mainly look for jobs involving biology. But what you studied at university matters less than many imagine — most people don’t end up working in something directly related to their field of study, and most jobs don’t require that you studied a specific subject.³ It’s often possible to switch fields within a few months or a year of retraining, as we’ve seen already with examples like Rashida switching from nursing to biosecurity. A biologist can also enter careers in organisation-building, policy, or communications, or develop technical skill such as data science.

This illustrates the first flaw of pros and cons lists. By the time you’re making a list of pros and cons, it’s already too late! The most important stage was figuring out which options to list in the first place. Worse, they sneakily encourage you to compare only two options side by side, when ideally you should generate a much longer list.

The point of much of the rest of this guide is to help you think of more options. Take your expanded list of pressing problems, and then try to find out what each problem most needs and generate ideas for how you could help. Take our list of careers in part six of the guide and use that to think of even more ways of helping.

Once you have an initial list, look for ways to further broaden your thinking. Imagine you can’t do any of the options you’ve already listed. Then what would you do? Try removing constraints: imagine, for example, what you’d do if you had no fear of failure. What would an imaginary job that’s amazing on all of your criteria look like? Even if what you come up with isn’t practical, maybe there’s something nearby that could work. Getting an outside perspective is one of the other best ways to broaden your frame, so ask other people for ideas too.

Often, one of the most useful steps is to look for ways to combine or adjust your existing options to make them a better match. For example, if you’d like to accept a job but are hesitating because you’d need to move cities, can you negotiate to work most of the time remotely?

Jess Binksmith was an undergraduate in philosophy at St Andrews in Scotland, and was trying to decide what to do after graduation. She’d applied to some master’s programmes, and since that was what so many of her peers were doing, it seemed like an obvious path. She was also considering careers in government. If she’d made a pros and cons list at that point, it would have been between these two options. Instead, she decided to take some time and try to come up with more ideas. She read our guide and realised that because she liked running student societies, operations management in an impactful organisation might be a good fit for her too. We’ll come back to her story in the next step.

Step 2: structure your decision

In 1979, the University of Texas was forced to admit 50 extra medical students late in the admissions season after the state legislature mandated a last-minute enrolment increase. Each of these new students had already been rejected based on interviews with university faculty and were expected to underperform the rest of the class. However, at the end of five years of medical training, there was no statistical difference between these previously rejected applicants and the rest of the class.⁴ This study is just one of dozens which have concluded that interviews are often not good indicators of who would perform well. But why were these interviews so useless?

One reason is a lack of structure. When interviewers simply use their judgement to decide which applicants are best, it becomes much easier to be swayed by irrelevant factors like first impressions or physical appearance.⁵ But it turns out interviews can be greatly improved by having interviewers list a few key traits required to do the job, and then rating each applicant on those traits. This is called a structured interview.

As we saw in our discussion of personal fit, unstructured interviews are among the worst ways to predict job performance, while structured interviews are one of the best.⁶ In a structured interview, the final decision isn’t blindly determined by which applicant scores the most points — it’s still down to the judgement of the interviewer — and yet asking the interviewer to explicitly consider each trait makes them far more reliable.

We can apply a similar logic to career decisions. Most people make their career decisions in an unstructured way. They compare the options in front of them in abstract terms and then go with how they feel. But if structuring is what works best in hiring, it’s probably what works best for job-seekers picking where to work too.

This makes sense because in career decisions there are so many factors to consider that it becomes all too easy to get swayed by something shiny but ultimately not that important, such as what your friends think is cool, the starting salary, or the office ping-pong tables. It also becomes easy to forget one of the factors that do really matter, such as how engaging the work is hour to hour and how supportive your colleagues will be (another example of narrow framing).

Herein lies the second problem with pros and cons lists: they encourage you to make a long list of factors but with little prioritisation between them. Structuring, however, helps you stay focused on the most important couple of factors.

So what are the most important factors for comparing career options? Answering that question has been one of the purposes of the preceding sections, in which we introduced our ‘career framework’:

• Career capital — does this option significantly accelerate you towards your longer-term career goals, or otherwise open up good options? You can break this down into skills and knowledge, connections, credentials, effects on your character, and contributions to financial runway.

• Immediate impact — how pressing is the problem addressed and how large a contribution might the typical person in this job make to the problem?

• Personal fit — how well do you expect to perform in this job, compared to the typical person, if you work at it over several years? Try to identify the key drivers of success in the field and find out how you stack up on them.

• Supportive conditions — how would this path satisfy other important personal priorities that aren’t already covered, such as engaging work, supportive colleagues, having your basic needs met (e.g. fair salary, reasonable commute, location), and fit with other life goals.

• Exploration value — might this path be an outstanding longer-term option that you’re uncertain about and can test out?

When Jess, the St Andrews philosophy undergraduate, began to doubt whether pursuing a master’s degree was the right choice, she took some time to think about the factors that were most important to her. She was instinctively drawn to focus on impact, but realised that career capital was most important right at the start of her career. She also realised that exploration value would be crucial, since she was very unsure about which path would be best.

During her career research, she became interested in the idea of doing a one-year paid position at the St Andrews student union, in which she would be responsible for managing the university’s sports clubs. Initially she felt unsure. Compared to doing a master’s, it sounded like a riskier option. However, because it would involve overseeing multiple clubs, she realised it would be a great way to test her fit with operations management. If she didn’t enjoy it, she could always go back to the master’s next year (or pursue something else).

When it comes to your own decision, take a little time to write out the key factors you’re going to use to compare your options. To avoid missing something, think broadly about which factors matter and then narrow them down based on importance. Aim for a list of about 3–7 factors. More than that, and it becomes hard to keep them in mind, and it means you’re probably not prioritising enough.

While you can use our list as a starting point, you can also try to make them more specific based on your situation. What type of career capital is most valuable to you? What signals best predict impact in the areas you’re focused on? What exactly are your priorities for personal satisfaction? It’s important to be honest here, getting your least noble motivations onto paper. You can pretend, for instance, that living out your fantasies as a Bushwick bohemian don’t matter, but if they actually do, ignoring them isn’t going to be sustainable.

Once you’ve made a list of factors, rate your options based on them, perhaps by scoring each option from 1–5. The idea here isn’t to unthinkingly go with whichever option gets the best score, but rather to use this as a tool to check that you’ve thought carefully about your most important priorities.

Step 3: go investigate

We often find that people get stuck analysing their options in their head, when it would be better to think like a scientist: figure out your key uncertainties and go investigate them. For example, we were advising an academic who wanted to take a year-long sabbatical (a year at another university without their normal responsibilities) but wasn’t sure where. They’d been thinking about the decision for some time, but hadn’t considered going to visit their top choice for a week, a move which would have likely made the decision a lot easier.

Pros and cons lists are another form of armchair analysis which may even stop people from doing the most useful thing: getting out of their armchair to go do things. Usually, the quickest way to resolve your key uncertainties will be to go and speak to people working in the field. But sometimes it’ll be appropriate to do cheap tests by trying out the work on a small scale or just making lots of applications. Keep investigating until you’ve used up the time budgeted for the decision, or your best guess is no longer changing.

If you’re unsure what to investigate, ask yourself why you’re most likely to be wrong about your current best-guess option. This can immediately clarify the most important uncertainty, and is one of the most useful tips to reduce bias generally.

Jess’s longer-term decision was between operations management, government, and academia. She’d realised that the student union role could be a good test for operations management. But before saying yes, she spoke to friends who worked at the union and were enrolled in graduate school to get a better sense of what day-to-day life would be like in each. This didn’t throw up any red flags about the union option, which turned it into her best guess. She still had doubts, however, which brings us onto the final step.

Step 4: don’t go with your gut, but check with it

Eventually, you’ll have to make a judgement call. This can feel quite painful, since you’ll be closing down a potential future, and you may feel deeply unsure about which option will turn out best. In part 13, we’ll talk about some ways to make this process less painful, but here’s one thing to especially keep in mind (and that pros and cons lists also won’t help you with).

As we saw, your gut instinct is best in situations where the environment is predictable, you have rapid feedback on the results of your decisions, and many opportunities to practice. Picking the career that will be most fulfilling and impactful in the long term is not like that, so simply “going with your gut” is a mistake.

However, there are many inputs into your overall decision where your gut is pretty wise. For instance, your gut can be pretty good at judging whether your boss is trustworthy, or how motivated you are right now to do the work. That’s because you’ve already had to figure out who to trust many times in your life before. This means ignoring your gut can be a mistake too.

An uneasy gut feeling can be a sign that one of these inputs is problematic, even if you haven’t realised consciously yet. Making career decisions involves far more information and factors than anyone can keep track of consciously. But your brain can still be aware of what’s going on in a way you can’t quite articulate.

When we speak to people about their biggest career mistakes, they often bring up stories where they ignored their gut because they had a rational case for something being best, or they were driven by their excitement about the prestige of the role, or some other grabbing factor, but actually their gut was picking up on a major problem.

Once you’ve made an initial assessment, sleep on it at least, and ideally let several days pass. This’ll give your gut a chance to process the decision, and help you to see it afresh, without being influenced by your current mood. If you still feel uneasy, take that seriously. Your goal now is to try to figure out why your gut feels that way. What is it telling you? Are the concerns serious?

The ’10:10:10 exercise’ can help you clarify how your gut feels, as well as gain greater perspective in general. Imagine you just made the decision 10 minutes ago, how do you feel? Now imagine it’s 10 months later — do you feel differently? Now imagine it’s 10 years later — what difference does that make?⁷

Once you’ve identified the source of the unease, reconsider your decision. Often the uneasiness will dissipate. If it doesn’t, you may be missing something else.

If, despite repeated investigation, the feeling doesn’t go away, then you’ll need to make a tricky call about whether to trust your gut and not take the option, or to push ahead anyway. You may just be nervous about doing something new.

The ideal of good decision making isn’t to have a fully systematic and describable framework, but rather to combine the best aspects of intuitive and systematic methods. In Jess’s case, she consulted her gut and realised she felt more excited about taking the student union job and starting work than pursuing the master’s. She wondered if her gut was recalling how over the last year she’d enjoyed running student societies much more than long stretches alone writing essays.

This turned out to be correct. Jess loved the challenge that came with the union job, and with that experience applied for a job at 80,000 Hours, which is how we came to learn her story. She now plans to continue in operations management, hoping to eventually become head of operations at an impactful organisation, or help to found a new one.

Finally, keep in mind there’s no such thing as the perfect decision. The four steps offered in this article — generating more options, structuring your decision, investigating, and checking in with your gut — aren’t about finding perfect certainty, they’re about giving you the best possible chance of making a decision you won’t regret.

More importantly, you’ll be avoiding the even bigger mistake of not making a decision at all — and either wasting time, or simply continuing in your current default. Probably some of your worst career decisions were those you never even considered making, times when you should have changed path but didn’t even realise you should think about it. That’s the worst type of narrow framing.

Even if you pick something and it turns out to be a mistake, you can plan ahead to reduce the downsides, as we’ll cover in part 13.

Read next:  Part 13: How to make your career plan

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