needs | Good Generation

To be able to choose a “do good” career that will suit us as different individuals, there is now more than ever a multitude of career options in areas including social entrepreneurship, impact investing and CSR or sustainability. At the same time, confusion for graduating students and mid-career professionals has equally grown since little has been done to explain how to choose between various options.

I proposed a 4-step proce ss that is meant to help both students and professionals navigate their decision-making for the right “social impact” job. The first step, which I dubbed “scale of impact”, is to decide how much impact really you want to have, whatever the change it is you hope to make. The second step I called “feeling of impact” and recognizes that although we may all have “doing good” in common as a general idea or intention, we still have distinct personalities and preferences that determine at what level we need to feel the impact we are making. In the third step, “need prioritization,” I suggested that there may be a general trade-off between being able to be maximize scale of impact at a given organization but not being able to feel our impact as meaningfully in our daily work in the same place.

In this final post of the series, I would like to finish with the fourth step, which is how to think about incorporating our unique individual life circumstances in our career decisions.

To be able to choose a “do good” career that will suit us as different individuals, there is now more than ever a multitude of career options in areas including social entrepreneurship, impact investing and CSR or sustainability. At the same time, confusion for graduating students and mid-career professionals has equally grown since little has been done to explain how to choose between various options.

I proposed a 4-step process that is meant to help both students and professionals navigate their decision-making for the right “social impact” job. The first step, which I dubbed “scale of impact”, is to decide how much impact really you want to have, whatever the change it is you hope to make.

The second step I called “feeling of impact” and recognizes that although we may all have “doing good” in common as a general idea or intention, we still have distinct personalities and preferences that determine at what level we need to feel the impact we are making. I tried to group “do-good” jobs in two broad categories according to the way people eventually experience impact and tried to argue that each person usually belongs to one or the other, but not both types of groups. Hence, identifying which category you belong to by virtue of how you wish to experience impact is yet another important variable to find the right do-good career.

In this post, I would now like to examine in the third step how to think about our needs and prioritize, especially between the two previously introduced concepts of scale and feel of impact.

Good Generation