It can be tough deciding your next career move. You need to take the time to choose which area in which to specialise. Like any major life decision, the more thought and care you put into the process, the better judgement you are likely to make. In this article, I offer some tips on how to make good decisions.
Often, the best way to make a good decision is to get help. I’ve been working as a careers and leadership coach since 2009, helping doctors make tough choices. I’d love to support you in your decisions!
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Self-awareness
It’s best to precede career decision-making by doing some work to raise self-awareness, as well as doing some research on all the options that are out there. Do some work on this area first, before you make a decision – and it’ll all go towards helping make that choice a good one.
Self-awareness is about being honest about your own achievements, as well as your strengths and weaknesses. Think about your skills. For example are you good at:
- communicating with different types of people
- numbers
- presentations
- training people/teaching
- doing research
- having a controllable lifestyle
- earning a high salary
- learning
- recognition
- independence at work
Thinking about your personality type and how you work with other people could be important too. For example do you prefer working as part of a small or larger team, or alone? Some mix of the three could be what you prefer.
Finally thinking about the stresses or strains that you might come across in a career, e.g. long hours, high expectations will be important.
There’s a lot more I could say about self-awareness and if you need extra outside help, then you can consider getting in touch with me and seeking help.
Understanding career decision-making
Once you understand yourself, the next step is to understand decision-making. This can be key to helping you to decide how to decide, which itself leads to better decisions.
It can be helpful to broadly divide decision-making into two fundamental approaches:
- System 1: Intuition/gut feeling (or fast decision-making)
- System 2: Logical/rational (or slow decision-making)
Intuition/gut feeling (fast decision-making)
Kahneman calls intuitive thinking – ‘system 1 thinking’. He describes it as fast thinking. This way of thinking uses senses, impressions and feelings to process a decision.
This way of thinking is mainly responsible for automatic and unconscious thought. In isolation, this manner of decision making is about having a real feeling that the decision is right, without having a sense of the logic behind it.
Logical/rational (slow decision-making)
This decision-making system involves using all the information available to try to make the best decision possible. Sometimes, this ‘system 2 way of thinking’, when we talk about decision-making, involves additional research, so that the decision is better informed. Once enough information is available, analytical techniques such as mind-mapping, pros vs cons, etc. are used to progress towards a decision. Naturally, this is more time consuming and difficult than system 1 thinking.
Tip: When doing reflections and the like for your professional portfolio or other qualifications, mentioning established theories such as Kahneman’s will be impress your assessors, demonstrating that you take your reflective practise seriously.
Should I use intuition or logic to make a career decision?
Dr Adrian Banks, a psychologist at the University of Surrey, in his work for the CIPD on Cognition, decision and expertise advises that usually both intuitive and logical thinking are used at the same time. Hambly and Bomford (career coaches) in their book ‘Creative Career Coaching’ call this ‘informed intuition’.
The somewhat automatic nature of system 1 decision-making makes it vulnerable to cognitive biases, which are systematic patterns of deviation from rational judgment. There are many, many cognitive biases, but some of the ones most likely to affect career decision-making include:
How the career decisions are presented to you may influence you
For example, if you know it’s a career your partner would love you to go into and they are trying to persuade you to take it up. However, it might not be right for you. Are you choosing or staying within this career path just to please them?
Another example is that some specialties might be presented as being more prestigious than others. GP v neurosurgery could be at the extreme end of this comparison.
You might be using shortcuts and rules of thumb, rather than taking time to think through things
Are you sure that you fully understand the pros and cons of the career path you are choosing? For example, if you’re choosing a career away from medicine, just because you know one person who works in, say the pharmaceutical industry, it’s not to say all roles in this area are the same. There may be different cultures in organisations. Therefore, when you are finding out about the different career options it’s good to speak to a range of people in the role-type you are exploring. You can, for example, go on taster weeks, look at Glassdoor for reviews, look at CQC ratings, see what industry experts are saying. By talking to a few people, and exploring the area thoroughly, you’re putting the brake on your career decision-making i.e. going through the slow decision-making process.
People often tend to undervalue themselves and their capabilities
Although some may tend towards optimism and overestimate their abilities. Therefore it’s essential to gain self-awareness and feedback on your strengths and transferable skills.
You may also value short-term gains over long-term ones
Are you choosing the career because it takes a shorter time to train in it? Take a look at those that have been in the career 10 years or more. Talk to some of them, as well as those who are just starting out.
These biases are often unconscious, so it is useful to slow down and try to remember to be aware of them.
Based on the above, you might think that for a decision as important as choosing a career path, system 1 thinking should be avoided altogether. Unfortunately, this isn’t really feasible. System 2 thinking works best with quantitative data, but some of the information that feeds into your decision-making is impossible to quantify. For example, how would you compare the quality of life benefits of living in your preferred city to working in your preferred speciality or career area? Both of these things are vitally important, but they are also both nebulous, highly multifactorial concepts that don’t lend themselves well to direct comparison.
The more data-minded amongst you might think about trying to quantify and compare them using an arbitrary scale of preference, such as in the table below. (Interestingly, this would be an example of using system 1 decision-making to facilitate system 2 decision-making). However, you then must consider whether these two concepts deserve equal weighting in your analysis (i.e. is job satisfaction more important than where you live?). Therefore, this endeavour soon becomes unwieldy. It is therefore unlikely to be helpful. An intuitive, ‘gut-feeling’ way of making a decision, is a more natural way to process all these factors and reach a decision. In a snapshot you are taking the ‘temperature’ of the circumstances that surround your career dilemma.
Career Options | |||
Option 1 | Option 2 | ||
Location | Rating | Location | Rating |
Edinburgh | 8/10 | London | 6/10 |
Speciality | Rating | Speciality | Rating |
Rheumatology | 7/10 | Cardiology | 10/10 |
Total score | 15/20 | Total score | 16/20 |
Using informed Intuition
The career decision-making process is made even harder by the fact that the factors that influence your decision are often dynamic. For example, the factors that make a certain speciality attractive or unattractive may change with the advent of new technologies. Also, different areas of the country and patterns of working may become more/less appealing based on your life circumstances, e.g. being in a relationship, having a family, etc.
Furthermore, some things are practically unknowable, despite considerable research. For example, think back to your experiences in certain wards/departments: the overall ‘feel’ of what it’s like to work somewhere (e.g. organisational culture, leadership styles, collegiate relationships, etc.) is very hard to quantify. This is even harder to communicate to an outsider. Some things you just cannot know until you experience them for yourself.
As such, you can only ever hope to make the best career decision possible based on the information you had at the time and trying to quantify everything to facilitate pure system 2 decision-making would not be worthwhile. This is why I encourage informed intuition. This will help you to tune into your intuitive feelings and then stand back to reflect on those reactions. In this way, you are using a mix of fast and slow decision-making.
Research
It should now be clear that major career decisions are best made with informed tuition, achieving a practical balance of system 1 and system 2 thinking. However, this requires that you have sufficient information about your situation and choices, which may require additional research. Your decision is only ever as good as your information.
As a career coach I’ve worked with doctors since 2009, I’ve helped people choose their speciality or career path, and I can now help you too!
Get in touch with me, email: [email protected]