Asklemmy

You need to figure out:

• What you like
• What you’re good at (or can become good at with training/a degree)
• What people will pay you to do

If you like something, you’re good at it, and people will pay you to do it, that’s a career. Stick with it your entire life.

If you’re good at something and people will pay you to do it but you don’t like it, that’s a job. Work it to pay the bills, but don’t be afraid to jump ship as soon as something better comes along.

If you like something and are good at it but no one will pay you to do it, that’s a hobby. You’ll need to supplement that with a job to get by.

If you like something and people will pay you for it but you’re not good at it, fake it ‘till you make it, my friend.

[cynical rant – take with a bucket of salt]

you don’t

you pick something that you are competent at that pays the bills and keeps you alive and gives you enough free time to work on what you actually want to do

traditional boomer advice was to pick something you love, but after putting in endless hours of doing it over and over just to make enough to keep you fed and provide a place to sleep, you will grow to resent it with a passion – for your own mental health, you absolutely must maintain a separation between the job and your personal life

Honestly this is one of the major failures of how schooling works currently. Because everything is so generalized, people fresh out of HS have very little value to any real job. They also have very little understanding of how real jobs work.

Most people just end up taking a job because they know someone that helps them. They end up in whatever industry that is and go from there. It don't have a lot to do about what you "want" to do with your life and more about the necessity of having money to survive.

There is no such thing anymore as a job for life anymore that ended in the 80s. I don't honestly think that's there's a career for life anymore either, that ended in the early years of this century.

Asking someone to choose something to do for 50 years (if they're lucky) at 16 or 18 is folly.

Build yourself a portfolio of skills which you are proficient in and enjoy doing. I would include (1) languages in that and (2) the technique of communication over and above any technical skills you possess.

I say languages because a second language awakens a different mode of thought, maybe not too much if the languages are closely related.

I'm Gen X and was probably never conventionally employable. Company Roles I've had seemed to seek me rather than me them. I wish I had been much more aggressive about a second language much earlier on.

It's not the language itself. It seems to assist in fluidity of communication. I'm not sure that I can explain what I mean by that: the structure of French sentences differs wildly from English sentences sometimes, but about 30% of English words are French in origin. It seems to encourage me to thing about how I am conveying my idea in words without me being cognisance of that happening.

If you end up hating your job just keep looking and find a different company or position. Job satisfaction is so many factors, e.g. how well you get along with your coworkers, how much recognition you get from the higher ups for what you do and so on. The career path you choose now might not affect the outcome that much.

If you decide to go to college, you have a couple years of general ed classes to get out of the way. Pick a wide variety of things you are interested in. If one clicks maybe it’s the career for you.

Nobody gets out of high school and gets the job they want when they grow up. ;)

Your first job is going to suck. It's going to be hard work. The pay and hours are not going to be great. You won't be respected as an employee or often as a human being.

What it's going to teach you are organizational skills. Show up on time. Do the best job you can do. Admit your mistakes and learn from them.

Carry what you learn there to the next job and the next job. Do better each time. Learn new skills. Find jobs that interest you.

If you can, go to college for a STEM degree, network with other people and employers, and when you get out of college, you can do what you want.

If college isn't for you, find a trade you're good at and enroll in trade school. Plumbers, electrictians, HVAC techs, mechanics are never out of work.

Avoid: Retail work. Restaurant work. It will break you. Fine for when you're in school, not if you're out of school.

College is a great place to start. Unfortunately college is ridiculously expensive these days, but community college is still pretty affordable. There are so many things you don't even know exist in the world right after highschool. The world also works a lot differently than you've seen so far, so a college level education is really beneficial. Go to community college, knock out some Gen Ed courses, and take some interesting classes for your electives. You'll learn about stuff that you didn't know existed and you may find that you're passionate about some of those things.

This is not a valid question. You should be looking for a direction, not specifcs. Career is a combination if what you want to do, what you are willing to do, and what the job market needs right now. If you focus on a dream job you can get stuck with no job as the market doesn't need that.

What if I offered you a job but you had to move go the most remote Africa? Some would jump at it, others would hate it. Would you work a job where you are on the phone all day? Would you work a job in software testing? Would you be happy as a tour guide? Different people have different answers. You are allowed to change your mind later.

There is also what you are willing to go through for money. Doctors make a lot of money, but often have to work long hours and can be on call in the middle of the night, not to mention med school is hard. The world needs more engineers, but again it needs a lot of school .

So pick a direction that sounds good. Then refine it based on both what you like and what opportunities open up.

This is certainly not an easy task! Hell, I am 46 years old and still figuring out life. 🤣 In all seriousness though, you will probably change careers 2-3x in your life or more. Maybe just figure out something that you could see yourself doing for the next 5-10 years and have a go at it? That would be my recommendation. Choose a career that will at least pay you enough so that you can live with a bit of comfort.

I got into university with a firm plan of my career and then realised it was not for me in my third year. I’m now a teacher and would let change career for anything. What advice I can give (which I give to my own students) is decide which career you will not or cannot do. Don’t like kids? Remove those careers from your thoughts. Don’t want to work in a cubicle for 8 hours a day? Then you won’t like office work. When you start to think it through, you’ll remove all the careers that you can’t or won’t do. That’s normally enough to give you a good starting point to thinking about what you would want to do as a career

That’s the neat part: you don’t.

Truthfully, it’s a huge thing to ask an eighteen-year-old to plan for the rest of their life over the next couple of years. For some people, they might need to take a year or two off before even thinking about going to school again; others, they might go to a trade school instead, or just not even bother with college all together.

I think the “best general advice” I would give is to just try out community college for a bit and take classes, join clubs, and/or participate in activities that interest you - don’t even worry about gen ed stuff until you’re sure you want to continue into a 4-year college for a bachelor’s or higher degree. Start working jobs that either genuinely interest you or offer a decent wage & benefits so you can at least have some sort of “work experience” to fall back on, and just explore stuff that interests you or sounds interesting. And if you’re in the camp of “I don’t have any interests”, then do random shit and see what sticks or not.

In general, I think the worst thing to do after high school is nothing and stay stuck in the same position in life. As long as you’re doing something that you want to do, that’s gonna be a step in the right direction.

It's not wrong to start with whatever / at random. Once you gain some experience you can decide whether to pursue or try something else.

For me it came naturally from my interests and learned capabilities.

You can ask about and try out different jobs to get a bit of insight and more data points for making a decision. Even if you won't have a definite favorite you may find things you consider undesired or desirable for you.

Don't worry too much about getting 'locked in' to a job, you can always do a career change, it's a lot easier than you think.

This is a major failing of the school system.

The best I can recommend is that you try out jobs now -- but maybe skip anything 'fake' like online courses unless you think they prepare you for what's in the next sentence. Go find people professionally doing a thing you might like, and try to work with them, somehow. Internships, volunteer work, organizing events, etc. File paperwork and make coffee, if that means you get to see the work actually being done.

Barring that, do the thing yourself if possible. Publish the results. All code goes on public repositories, all stories should be submitted to magazines or literature groups. All songs written must be sung in public. Get certified for CPR and first aid if considering medicine, and volunteer using it. Get an amateur radio license and build a radio. Look at jobs on a freelancing platform, and just do them on your own to build a portfolio (maybe actually apply for the jobs, once you have a portfolio). Not every type of job can be tried out this way, but many can.

You're going to get rejected a lot, you can't just show up with a resume and demand a job (people who claim this works are weird). People who create and do nothing will mock you sometimes. A lot of jobs want young people 'out of sight and in school' too. However, this kind of disappointment happens to all of us at some point anyway, so may as well get it over with.

If you're lucky, you've got a few years between the age of say 14 and 19 where you're not expected to support yourself financially but your brain works as well as it's ever going to. While it's useful to get good grades while you're in school (although they are useless afterward), I think it's a mistake to focus on that at the expense of actually trying to do things. A college degree is too big of an investment of time and money to go into blind.

If you're in a situation where you do have to support yourself or your family before finishing school, then the necessities of life obviously take precedent. I won't pretend I have a good solution to that difficult situation.

My advice is just pick a broad direction and try to optimize for not limiting your options.

When I was 18 I liked math and science so I went to school for engineering. Did I want to be an engineer? I had no idea at the time. But I figured the first couple years were mostly math and science courses anyway so if something else caught my attention (computer science, chemistry, etc) I could narrow my focus when the time came.

If you don't plan to go to college, that's cool too. My advice in that case would still be not to limit yourself. Pick something in your broad interest area that challenges you and has a clear path of advancement (certifications, etc). If you don't like it after a few years find something else. Just make sure with whatever you pick the growth path is pretty clear and at least somewhat in your control.

There's a lot of advice here to work for money and that it's a fool's errand to "follow your dreams". This is the same advice I got twenty years ago when I was 18. I followed it. That path led to money but I'm not sure it precisely led to a life of fulfillment or contentment. I often wish I'd spent more of my early twenties taking more risks and chasing more dreams. You're only young once, and age accumulates life baggage (e.g., bills , mortgage , life partner, maybe kids) that discourages risk taking. Don't forget to take a risk every now and then, you might end up surprising yourself.

You want the job that is offered to you, pays good, and won't feel like hell every day. This job may or may not be related to your field of study, but you better study something useful if you want to be taken seriously.

Stop thinking that you can pick and choose, sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. Some people can, most people can't.

I'm 29 and I still don't know.

After highschool (I actually dropped out) I worked a ton of dead end jobs. Cooking mostly, but there was roofing, painting, digging holes, lots of manual labour.

Eventually I moved to Vancouver and had an opportunity to become a card dealer. It was.... How do I put it so you can fully understand... The worst experience by far, ever. It was toxic abusive, exhausting, and just all around the worst.

My partner at the time got pregnant and she actually gave me an out, said I didn't have to be there at all. I thought my options over and decided I was going to be apart of this kids life and enrolled in college for IT. It was a bit of cheating really, I was already good at it so why not. 18 years later, I'm a consultant, doing well and my daughter is starting grade 12 next year.