Career Choices - New and Old

One of the things that interests me most about career choices is that many students and their parents tend to revert to default. Default is often those standard or core careers that tend to come into mind whenever careers are discussed. These include accounting, engineering, banking, medical (doctor, nurse etc) and other usual suspects. Granted, there are a lot of jobs available in these default/classic careers, but where's the realisation that the world of work has changed?

Parents are not well equipped at all to advise their kids on the new careers and roles that are available and unless the kids themselves do their research, neither are they. It seems to me that there's quite a long lag time between new types of roles emerging into the world of work and awareness of these roles as career options by the general population.

So what are the exciting new career choices and how do people find out about them? Most new careers tend to develop in the areas that are getting a lot of news coverage and where social, economic and other trends are leading. So with the web for example, because this is an area in which there is so much activity, a host of new roles and career choices have emerged. These include programming in new open source languages, web marketing including pay per click marketing, viral marketing, search engine optimisation, blogger, social media marketing and so on. The environment is another area in the news. In the past 10 years, we've seen the emergence of careers such as carbon management consultants, conservation scientists and environmental sustainability consultants. These are just a few examples.

The good news is that although some of these, particularly the environmental roles require serious study (normally a Masters degree to get in), for most of the web roles you can build your skill and expertise by teaching yourself, learning from the community and trying things out. If you have the desire and interest to learn, this is a very open area. Of course, the very fact that it is so open makes some of these new career choices very competitive. Buy hey, if you're prepared to settle for a career that is not competitive then you need to be prepared to settle for what goes with that - poor earnings and prospects.

So one of the tricks of good career planning is not to make decisions too early and not to make decisions without research. You wouldn't go and buy a new car without doing a load of research. Why on earth would you consider committing to a career without some serious research and analysis?