process | Good Generation

Career

4 Steps to Choosing a “Good Career” (Part 4) – Reality Check

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.

Tagged approach, career, check, choosing, circumstances, deciding, feel, feeling, impact, jobs, method, needs, personal, prioritize, prioritizing, process, reality, scale, social

Career

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.

Tagged approach, career, choosing, deciding, feel, feeling, impact, jobs, method, needs, prioritize, prioritizing, process, scale, social

Career

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. Knowing this extent of your vision will be helpful in narrowing down the type of organization you will consider joining (or launching), i.e., some organizations will be more likely to reach your personal impact ambitions than others.

However, that is only half of the work. In this post, I cover the second step, which deals with really trying to understand to what degree or “how” you need to feel the impact you will be making on a day-to-day basis to be happy.

Tagged approach, career, choosing, deciding, feeling, impact, jobs, method, prioritizing, process, scale, social

Career

Key Ideas:

You are an experienced professional in the middle, or a student at the beginning of your career. For whatever reason, you have decided you now want to “do good” with your career… or “more” good than you previously have, whatever that means. But you don’t quite know in what area and in what capacity. Whether or not you are deeply passionate about a particular issue area, e.g., education, healthcare, energy, human rights, sustainable food, etc., you just know you want to have a (more) meaningful social impact in your area of choice.

However, the options can be bewildering. Either they all kind of sound good or, more likely, they all kind of sound the same. Should you go into nonprofit? Join a social enterprise? Try your luck with corporate social innovation aka “CSR”? How about impact investing? How about consulting for sustainability? What’s wrong with just a good old “traditional” for-profit job? The list goes on.

If you are the student, you may ask where you should start. If you are the experienced professional considering a change, you will ask how to choose between a host of options before pouring in your remaining heart, time and energy.

In this four part post series my goal is to propose a simple, yet hopefully useful approach of evaluating and picking what may be a suitable do-good career option for you. Using it may save you some time and disheartening experiences along the way to becoming and remaining a changemaker throughout your life.

Tagged approach, career, choosing, deciding, feeling, impact, job, jobs, method, path, prioritizing, process, scale, social