Think about career prototyping

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What we know about careers largely comes from the culturescape of parental influence, educational expectations and social pressures. Personal doubts, preferences and anxiety further complicate it. Career prototyping can make informed career decisions unaffected by such social conditioning and cognitive biases.

The reasons for prototyping

Career counsellors advise us to answer questions such as “Who am I?” “What do I love to do?” — and prompt us to match our strengths, weaknesses, motivators, and values to the available job market. This straightforward theoretical process serves only as a beginning but is insufficient to make any serious career decisions.

This is mostly because we are unsure of what we want, our motivations may vary, our values may shift, and skills are contextual and relative. So we need career prototypes as the next step.

Career prototyping uses the tenets of design thinking. Careers need to be designed, curated, and lived through. As we expect more turbulent career seasons ahead, it makes sense to test your idea or concept of a career through exposure to it.

Career prototyping is essentially a focused form of experiential learning, a micro-career exposure during which we experience errors, oversights, and failures.

A banking executive, inspired by the passion theory shifted to teaching and later found himself doing more administrative work and very little fruitful teaching.

On the other hand, if you think you would like to be in retailing, get an experience in a retail shop for two weeks. Such micro-career exposures co-discover the fit, the career theme and develop skills simultaneously.

Methods of career prototyping

Creating skill maps and skill clusters using data from multiple sources resonates with sketching a product design. Reach out to individuals whose career paths you admire and pitch whether you can shadow them for a few days.

Informational interviewing extends job shadowing to listen and interact with people with first-hand experience. So, go with questions developed from your assumptions, doubts, and queries on career paths that you want to discover.

During the informational interview, ask whether you need to have an additional talk with anyone that you hadn’t spoken to. Analysing the career graph of professionals can boost the interaction. Freelancing works can also give a taste of things to come. Many sites offer freelance roles from graphic design to programming. Such quick methods are comparable to rapid prototyping.

Industry job descriptions work as job templates. Look for the commonalities, differences, and expectations in those descriptions. Structured summer programmes and short-term assignments also bear a real-world component, though they may not capture the entire complexity.

To test augmented features of a product or service, organisations use feasibility prototypes. Similarly, skill inventory tests, psychometric tests, and trait matching exercises leading to skill gap analysis can ensure our job readiness and career feasibility.

A variety of personality tests such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or strengths-finder are available in free and paid versions to aid this.

Full-time internships, boot camps and volunteering programmes work as career cousins of the working model. Volunteering, being the simplest hands-on experience approach to career prototyping, can vary from events to research projects. However, many internships currently conducted turn out to be academic exercises leaving out the prototyping value.

Very often, all the work interfaces of a career, its types, pressures, and hierarchy cannot be captured in job profiles as they are deeply embedded in the organisational culture. Unearthing them requires immersions.

Externship helps preview the job through shadowing, attending programmes, undertaking small projects with short durations compared to internship, and are largely done with partner organisations.

The question remains which to select out of the different methods above. Do all possible to get closer to reality.

Outcome and future

Good prototyping moves beyond mere advice and counselling and works with real people, in a real project with deadlines.

It involves the deconstruction of beliefs so you can build a realistic picture. It allows you to test the reality of a career without a long-term commitment.

For example, a career in advertising was seen as glamorous by many students while I was teaching management. It took them to do a few of the career prototyping approaches to know that the entry profile of media executives involves tedious negotiations and number crunching.

Career prototyping is yet to be formalised in regular career guidance circles. But it is never too late to do a career prototyping, whether you are a beginner or someone pondering a career shift. After all it is worth more than a paid course.

We will soon find ourselves constantly prototyping new ways of doing work, in new forms of industries in new roles that are yet to come.

(The author is an education officer with the University Grants Commission. Views are personal)