Resources for Wharton Undergraduates & Alumni
Career Planning Process: Where Do I Begin?

The thought of choosing and planning for a future career can be daunting for many. Oftentimes this is simply because you might not know where to begin your search! There are so many career possibilities out there, how do you choose "the right one" among them? At the same time, this process can be quite exciting -- an entire world of possibilities waits to be explored!

Choosing a career is more of a journey than a destination, and there is no one "right" path to take. You may travel many different roads before finding the one that offers you the most satisfaction. Although there are numerous opportunities available to you, you do have to start somewhere in your organization. The links below help you do just that -- they provide you with a process for building educational and career goals, along with suggesting tools and strategies to help you meet those goals. So, if you are not sure where to begin, why not begin here?

Assessing Yourself
Exploring Options
Making Decisions
Taking Action

ASSESSING YOURSELF

Making good decisions depends upon gathering good information. The first step is to gather information about yourself. What do you like to do with your time? What activities do you perform especially well? What are the things in life that are most important to you? Interests (likes/dislikes), skills (competencies/knowledge), and values (where you place importance) are some of the most important factors to consider when exploring the choice of a concentration and a future career. Knowing yourself well makes it easier to narrow (or expand!) your options, because you can use what you know to evaluate how well a particular concentration or career will fulfill what you like and what is important to you. Your greatest professional satisfaction occurs when you are in a career that uses those identified characteristics.

Values

Acknowledging that your value system extends into your work life will assist you in achieving career satisfaction. When considering career fields, explore the work values you think are important. Examples of work values include:

• working as a team member on projects
• being in a position of prestige or prominence
• having a position that offers job security
• being in a fast-paced environment with lots of variety
• high salary
• wanting to have pleasant co-workers
• opportunities for professional development
• organization that is sensitive to family issues
• environment that values and supports diversity
• opportunity to supervise others
• good benefits
• career advancement potential
• making a contribution to society

Interests

Most people want to enjoy and be truly interested in what they do every day. That is why knowing your interests is so important. To begin the process of clarifying your interests, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What activities did you participate in during high school?
• How do you spend your free time?
• If you were not in school, how would you spend your time?
• What hobbies do you have?
• In order of most to least interesting, how would you rank these words: data, people, things?

Think back to high school and the types of activities you were involved in: athletics, student clubs, honor societies, community service, and so on. What was it that drew you to these activities? Why did you enjoy them - or did you? Now think about the activities you are participating in during college; are you:

• A member of a student organization? Which one? What do you do as a part of your membership?
• Involved in community activities or volunteer work? What drew you to these organizations?
• Participating in intramural or varsity athletics?
• A world traveler? What languages and cultures are most fascinating to you? Why?
• Working? Where do you work and what do you like/dislike about it?
• Meeting different types of people? Who are you drawn to and what do you do with your friends?

You may find that your college interests are very similar to those from high school, that you have gotten more deeply involved in certain activities that you were already interested in during your high school days. On the other hand, college life may be introducing you to a variety of people, activities, and organizations that you have never had the opportunity to get involved with in the past. Your interests may be changing as you discover these new people and activities. Take a look at how you spend your time, where you spend it, and with whom. Answering the questions above can help give you a better sense of who you are and what you want to be doing with your time (your work time as well as your free time). Since you will be spending the majority of your time at work, it makes sense to look for ways to incorporate your day-to-day interests into your choices of academic study and careers.

Do not try to make the connection too early -- identify and explore your interests before you try to connect them to a future career. Nevertheless, use your imagination to generate ideas of how you might use your interests in a future career -- you might be surprised at the connections you make!

If you are having trouble identifying your interests and how they relate to various career options you might consider taking and interest inventory or "test" to help you further identify and clarify your interests. Consult with a career counselor to find out more about your options or visit the Career Services links to online assessments.

Skills

Skills come in many shapes and sizes. Some researchers contend that by the age of 21 the average person has hundreds of skills. It is rare in any one job to use them all, but most occupations and career fields do have certain combinations of skills that are important for achieving success and satisfaction. Some skills are work content-specific; in other words, you must have this skill to be in the occupation (e.g., a surgeon needs a thorough knowledge of human anatomy, a computer programmer needs to know certain programming languages). Other skills are transferable in nature; if you have the skill in one career field, it "transfers" to another field. For example, someone working in the accounting field should have strong quantitative ability, excellent attention to detail, and solid organizational skills; all three of these skill areas would be equally valued in finance, marketing, or consulting positions. Personal qualities, such as enthusiasm, motivation, and ability to learn quickly, are also considered skills.

It is not absolutely necessary (or possible) to be expert in all skills desired in a particular profession. You do not need to be a whiz at calculus in order to be a successful analyst. If you struggle consistently with a number of skills that are crucial to performing in a particular occupation, you might want to reassess your strengths to determine how and where they might be better utilized. Many people do not enjoy doing things they do not do well. Others consider the prospect of attempting to master new skills to be an exciting and rewarding challenge. Be sure to examine your strengths (and weaknesses) and decide for yourself how best to use them.

Weaknesses can be things that you do not do well. A weakness may also be a task that takes you longer to accomplish - you might still perform it well, it just takes longer than other tasks. For example, you may find it quite easy to develop a spreadsheet to analyze a company's financials, but it make take you longer to prepare the oral presentation of your results. Public speaking may be a "weakness," because it takes you longer to prepare, even though you still ultimately perform the task well. Something that you are usually unsure about, that causes some hesitation or anxiety, even though you are competent when you do it, can also be considered a weakness. In terms of your own feelings, when you feel uncertain about the quality of your performance during some activity, you might view this activity as a weakness of yours.

Once you identify what you perceive to be your weaknesses, spend some time evaluating what you can do about them. If interviewing for a job is something that makes you terribly nervous, a good strategy to attack that weakness is to practice and refine your interviewing skills through a mock interview. If you do not write well but are interested in careers that require a great deal of report writing, you might enroll in an extra composition course to work on your writing skills. People will sometimes avoid certain careers because they convince themselves that their weaknesses would keep them from being successful in that field. When comparing your skills to those typically required in a certain profession, do not be too quick in dismissing that career as an option for you. If the job truly demands training you do not have, or if it sounds boring or uninteresting to you, then you can decide to not to pursue it further. The point is, once you identify something that you think needs to be improved, you can consult with faculty, friends, family, and counselors to develop actions plans to address those areas for improvement. Once you develop strategies to compensate for or get rid of your weaknesses, many more career choices will feel open to you.

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EXPLORING OPTIONS

After gathering information about yourself, you can begin exploring concentrations and career options - just what is out there? You should not be making a decision at this point; instead, you should simply be increasing your knowledge of  various academic disciplines and careers. There are a number of methods for researching your options:

• Utilize resources in the Career Services library. A number of books, periodicals, and newsletters are available to help you explore careers. You can usually find an overview of a profession, typical activities performed, qualifications required, job outlook for the future and salary potential.


• Explore online. The World Wide Web is a vast source of information that should be tapped when researching careers. Visit the links we have compiled to help you in your exploration [click here]. On your own, utilize a search engine to perform keyword searches, using job titles and industry names to cultivate information.


• Talk to people about what they do. Once you have identified an occupation that sounds interesting, talking with people who already work in that field can be tremendously informative. They can provide special insight into the rewards and rigors of a particular occupation, as well as tell you specific information about their organization. People with the same job title, in the same type of industry, might perform very different functions (e.g., consulting with Andersen Consulting might be quite different than with Bain & Company). Use the Penn Career Network to identify alumni to speak with. Network with friends, family, professors and others to learn more about the "world of work."


• Volunteer or pursue work experiences. A valuable way to research careers is by getting involved in them early. Volunteering, working part-time, conducting research with a professor, or securing an internship are all great ways to gain a deeper appreciation of day to day life in a particular field or industry. Practical experiences help you evaluate and "reality test" your choices.

Utilize as many different resources and gather as much information as possible. Use what you have learned about yourself to rule out the obvious choices that are not for you. This is time consuming and, at times, overwhelming, but the investment you make in gathering good information often aids good decision making.

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MAKING DECISIONS

Making the actual decision about which concentration or career to pursue can be the most difficult and frustrating part of the process. It is scary to think, "Do I really want to do this the rest of my life?" It is nerve-wracking to wonder, "What if I make the wrong choice?" These are not uncommon feelings, but they are the greatest myths about career decision making. Generally speaking, roughly two thirds of all college students change majors at least once. On average, people change careers fields three to four times in their lifetimes. A decision in college about an initial career path does not predetermine the rest of your life!

A career is really is series of jobs and other events that string together to form a larger pattern. When making career decisions, start with short term goals: "What do I hope to accomplish and learn in the next few years?" You may have an ultimate goal of becoming the CEO of a major corporation, but to achieve that large goal, you need to set smaller and more readily achievable goals first. You can never completely map out or plan what will happen to you next, so look first at the short term and evaluate the next level of skill development you hope to achieve.

Students who have been out of college for 5 years have gone on to do many different things. After two or three years of work experience, many return to school for an MBA. Many students go on to pursue law and medical degrees, as well as other fields of graduate study. Still others have taken time to travel around parts of the world, teaching English as a second language or getting involved in world volunteer organizations. All of these Wharton alumni, people who were presumably somewhat similar to you when they were undergraduate students, have gone on to a variety of activities under the label of "career." There is no one right path to follow. Instead, you want to take a look at your values, interests, skills, and lifestyle preferences in order to make the "best" decision for yourself.

You make the best decisions you can based on the information you have at the time. There are few decisions that are completely irreversible. There are also no guarantees. Decision making involves some element of risk: you might make a good decision, only to have the outcome be different than expected. Decision making also involves an element of luck; sometimes, no matter what you do, opportunities surface and things click into place. You can minimize your risk and "organize your luck," however, by putting time and effort into assessing yourself and researching your options -- the first two steps of the process.

Keep in mind that it is rare for one job to meet all of your needs. You will have to do some bargaining and prioritizing to pick the jobs which meet your most important needs or allow you the flexibility to meet them outside the workplace. If you find that you are getting stuck in this stage of the process, you might want to revisit steps one and two. You might also decide to sit down and speak with a career counselor, to examine what you have done thus far and to identify potential strategies for getting unstuck.

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TAKING ACTION

You've made your decision! You're in the clear and it's time to relax, right? Wrong! You have already taken action by exploring your academic and career options. You have already taken action by talking to advisors and enrolling in courses to help you explore various Wharton concentrations. After having developed a more firm academic plan, you will want to turn your attention to what will happen after graduation -- what do you need to do to make yourself a competitive and marketable intern and full-time job candidate (or to pursue higher education)?

Throughout your college experience, look for ways to take control of your career planning. Be attentive to your classes; you don't need a 3.8 or above to get a good job, but it helps to be focused and to perform well in your studies. Get involved in student organizations to hone leadership, public speaking, organizational, and teamwork skills. Take the time to draft a resume and have it critiqued by a counselor. Develop and practice interviewing techniques. Investigate the many resources and strategies for searching for internships and employment, beyond on-campus recruiting. Pursue internships to build your knowledge, skills and abilities, as well as to continue learning more about the field.

Lots of people will tell you what you "should" be doing. Consider all advice carefully, but take everything with a grain of salt. You, ultimately, have to be the one to make the decisions. Your career prospects will not be devastated if you study abroad your junior year rather than take an internship. You need not concentrate in finance to get a good job, even in investment banking. You do not have to have a perfect GPA to be attractive to potential employers. You do need to be active in this process, however, to increase the chances of finding the career that offers the best fit for you.

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