We all seem to know that person who knew exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up. Sometimes her sense of certainty makes us feel pretty jealous. If you have no idea what you really want in terms of a career, then you could be facing one of these two conundrums.

The first is that you are being forced to make career choices when you have little work experience to go on, and perhaps are still in school.  How can you be sure of what you want without any experience to inform you in the first place?

The second case involves having plenty of work experience, but feeling like you might have chosen the wrong career path. If you are mid-career, you can’t exactly drop everything and take two years off to look for the answer.

In either case, you probably feel stuck and overwhelmed.

We can’t tell you for sure what job is going to truly satisfy you — no one can. But we can show you how to build the process for determining your ideal career. This way you can find your own answers with a sense of confidence and control.

I will share two different methods for finding those answers.  Depending on your personality, one method might work better for you than the other.

The first method is good if you are a natural planner who loves working with systems and keeping things under control. We call this method the Systematic

The second method is better if you prefer to live in the moment, follow your intuition and trust that things will work out. We will cover what we call the Luck Approach in part 2.

Let’s unpack the systematic approach.  If you are a natural-born planner, listen carefully.

We will pose the problem of finding your ideal career as a search problem.  On one end there is you, on the other end, there is the space of all careers.  The question is how do we efficiently search through this space in order to identify your ideal career?

Well, you could search from the bottom-up by looking at individual jobs or careers and assessing them for fit. For example, there is a comprehensive taxonomy published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you looked at 20 jobs a day, it would take you less than a year to get through the whole list. Daunting . . . but doable.

But if there’s such a thing as starting with too many options, you can also start with too few. Many people don’t explore enough.  Senior year in college, we go to the career fair, hand out a bunch of resumes, and take the best offer.  Next thing we know, we are tracked into a career that we never consciously chose.

If you ended up in a good career this way, that’s great. But if not, you might have nagging doubts that maybe you didn’t look through enough options. So how do you choose the most promising set of options so that it’s not overwhelming and also not too small or restrictive?

This time, let’s start searching from the top-down by assessing who you are and using that assessment to spotlight a relevant list of jobs.  I will refer to my career path here as an example.  When I was studying computer science in grad school, being a career coach couldn’t have been further from my mind.  I just knew I wanted a career that harnessed the following four qualities: I’m extroverted, I have a computer science degree, I enjoy intellectual stimulation, and I’m a doer who likes to make things happen.  After some research and asking people what careers came to mind when they thought about those four qualities, I created this list of career options.

[Insert list on screen]

In addition to pondering the question on your own, you can also bootstrap some new experiences by looking at the careers that people similar to you have enjoyed.  Career testing does exactly that. For example, “human resources manager” and “psychologist” were a few of the careers that popped up when I did some testing.

I narrowed my list down to four by doing some online research and interviewing people who knew about these jobs.   Here is the combined career list that my career testing and self-model generated for me.

[Insert list on screen]

The next step is to research and experiment to find out more about these jobs.  I decided to launch an experiment to test out the psychologist result, which I was particularly excited about.

I signed up to be a volunteer counselor at the local jail, and got training to counsel prison inmates. At first, when the guard left me alone with an inmate, I was pretty nervous.

But soon enough I felt as comfortable with the inmates as I did with students I TA’ed in college.  However, I had a hard time emotionally separating myself from the challenges my inmates faced. So while I enjoyed doing counseling work on Sundays, I discovered I would get burned out if that were my full time job.

Launching some of these experiments allowed me to learn about myself as well as various career paths. By breaking things down and launching small-scale experiments, you can learn about your options even while you are working a full time job. Over time, you can add to, and subtract from, your list of possible careers until you land on something that you are happy to try.