How to Plan a Career 4: Occupational Outlook Handbook

This continues a series on ensuring you find happiness and satisfaction in your career

If you followed the exercises in the previous posts, you will have 1) identified the skills that you totally delight using, 2) the vocational personality trait combinations that 3) match your interests and traits to occupations that bring you the greatest satisfaction and achievement. Before we continue, I want to remind you that good career planning begins with your passion, interests, and skills. Do not use today’s post to identify potential or hot jobs and then try to squeeze yourself into them.

How to Navigate the Occupational Outlook Handbook

The Department of Labor publishes the Occupational Outlook Handbook to help you explore careers at www.BLS.gov/oco. You will find the category navigation on the left side of the screen easy to use. Your options include:

• Management
• Professional
• Service
• Sales
• Administrative
• Farming
• Construction
• Installation
• Production
• Transportation
• Armed Forces
• Special Features

Click on the option that interests you. Roll over the option that interests you to reveal the categories. Click on the categories to reveal the list of occupations related to that category.

Information in the Occupational Outlook Handbook

You will find the following information about each occupation listed in the handbook:

• Nature of the Work describes the responsibilities, and working condition typically associated with the occupation
• Training, Other Qualifications, and Advancement defines how to qualify for this occupation
• Employment numbers how many people work in various sectors of the occupation
• Job Outlook tells you if the occupation grows “faster than the average”, “about as fast as average”, or “slower than the average.”
• Projections provides a table showing past, present, & future employment numbers
• Earnings describes salaries for the average and  top & bottom 10%
• Wages links you to local current wage data
• Related Occupations describes similar occupations
• Sources of Additional Information links you to more information from trade and professional associations

The Occupational Outlook Handbook helps you explore vocational options. Use it to verify the occupation matches your skills, passions, and interests.

Join me Wednesday to discover how the O-Net can help you learn more about occupations

How to Plan a Career 3: Holland’s Personality Traits

This continues a series on ensuring you find happiness and satisfaction in your career

Once you discover what you love to do, you need to identify compatible occupational fields. John Holland formulated a set of personality types. The Committee on Scientific Awards wrote “His research shows that personalities seek out and flourish in career environments they fit and that jobs and career environments are classifiable by the personalities that flourish in them”.

You Probably Possess All Six Personality Types

Holland identified six personality types. The acronym RIASEC represents the six types (I use the definitions from the University of Missouri Career Interest Game):

• Realistic (The Do-ers): People who have athletic or mechanical ability, prefer to work with objects, machines, tools, plants, or animals, to be outdoors.
• Investigative (The Thinkers): People who like to observe, learn, investigate, analyze, evaluate or solve problems.
• Artistic (The Creators): People who have artistic, innovating or intuitional abilities and like to work in unstructured situations using their imagination and creativity.
• Social (The Helpers): People who like to work with people to enlighten, inform,help, train, or cure them, or are skilled with words.
• Enterprising (The Persuaders): People who like to work with people, influencing, persuading, performing, leading or managing for organizational goals or economic gain.
• Conventional (The Organizers): People who like to work with data, have clerical or numerical ability, carry out tasks in detail or follow through on others’ instructions.

Most people possess all six types, but emphasize three. For example: some people may combine Realistic, Social, and Enterprising.  RSC would represent their code. Others possess SAI (Social, Artistic, and Investigative).

Several instruments can help you identify your personality types. They include Holland’s Self-Directed Search, The Strong Interest Inventory, Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory, and other self-assessment process.

Classify Jobs & Occupations by Personality Types

You can already access classification for more than 15,000 occupations. The University of Missouri Career Game helps you identify occupations based on Holland’s codes. They link back to the Occupational Outlook Handbook so that you can identify occupations that you would enjoy.

Join me on Monday when we discuss how the Occupational Outlook Handbook can help

How to Plan a Career 2: Find Your Passion

This continues our series on how to plan a career that can capture your passion

Thomas S. Monson advised youth and adults ““My advice . . . is that you should study and prepare for your life’s work in a field that you enjoy, because you are going to spend a good share of your life in that field. It should be one which will challenge your intellect and which will make maximum utilization of your talents and your capabilities. Finally, it should be a field that will supply sufficient remuneration [salary] to provide adequately for your companion and your children” (President Thomas S. Monson, “Life’s Greatest Decisions,” Sept. 7, 2003).

Begin With You

Most people plan a career backwards. They start by trying to find the top 10 growing jobs, something their uncle can get them into, or listings in the paper. They try to adapt to what they see. They fail to recognize how many options exist in the world. They fail to consider what they want to do.

I suggest that you begin your search by analyzing what you love to do, what you value, and what captures your passion. Several simple interest inventories can help you begin your journey of discovery:

• Dick Knowdell’s Career Values Test (free)
• Dick Knowdell’s Motivated Skills Test (free)
• Jung Typology Test (similar to the Myers-Briggs Typology Inventory) (free)
• Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS-II) (free)
• University of Missouri Career Game (free)

I also strongly encourage you to read and study What Color is Your Parachute? 2012 Edition by Richard Nelson Bolles. He provides some fascinating exercises in the book to help you discover what you want to do and why.

Join me on Friday when we explore Holland’s RIASEC code to match interests to occupations

How to Plan a Career 1: The World Has Changed

This begins a multi-part series on how to plan a career in today’s chaotic workplace

The world of work changed significantly during the last 40 years. You find yourself in the middle of an economic revolution as large as the industrial revolution. Remember how history in school taught us about the cataclysmic changes wrought as the world transitioned from the agricultural age to the industrial age? Well, we’re doing that again, and while the changes are different, the chaos and turmoil parallel each other well.

Changes in Today’s Workplace

The following list outlines just a few of the issues you will need to adapt to:

• Careers consist of a series of 3-5 year jobs rather than staying at 1 place for 30 years
• Project teams and lateral transfers dominate career paths
• Corporations offer fewer levels for upward promotions
• Careers (not jobs) will change 4-5 times in your work life
• Many of the occupations you may work in have not even been created yet
• Job titles mean less and job descriptions correspond less to the actual work done
• Companies invest less in their employees & pay less for their education and training
• Middle class jobs disappear faster, pensions disappear faster, & raises don’t appear
• Salaries don’t keep up with cost of living & most families need 3 incomes to get by

Good things happen too

Today’s workplace also provides positive opportunities for career paths:

• People still get hired for high paying jobs
• Frequent job changes allow for upward improvement and more money
• You can control your career, your happiness, and your success more than ever
• You have more opportunity to pursue your occupation passion than ever
• Management accepts and rewards good ideas that improve a return on investment
• Ingenuity, self-motivation, and communication skills increase chances for wealth

Changes in the workplace confuse many workers. The sum of changes, however, indicate the need for each of you to take control of your career and plan your own future.

Join me Wednesday when I share tools and procedures to identify the skills you love doing

Barriers to Retirement 7: Family Obligations

This concludes our series on possible barriers to retirement

A final barrier to retirement is family obligations. Many people approaching or in retirement find themselves having to use their money to address emergency family obligations. Frequently, these obligations directly spend the money faster than planned. Other times, the costs arise from indirect reasons.

Family obligations may include taking care of parents, spouses, siblings, children, grandchildren or yourself. While occasionally these emergencies could be prevented, frequently they could not. The purpose of this post is not to assign blame, but to confront the brutal fact that family obligations can erase retirement faster than anticipated.

Prepare as Best You Can

You can prepare for some of these family obligations with the following steps:

• Take out long-term care insurance on you and your spouse on your 60th birthday
• Ensure that your parents take out long-term care insurance on themselves, or give it to them as a birthday or anniversary gift. My brother-in-law took out a policy on his mother that saved the family hundreds of thousands of dollars and provide a good standard of living for 4 years after she had a stroke.
• Create educational savings accounts for your grandchildren while you are working
• Discuss among siblings or children how to share responsibilities before they become emergencies
• Establish a trust to protect some of your money, while giving you freedom to use it as needed
• Set guidelines for your children about what you can do, and what you cannot do, if they have problems. Dave Ramsey says never lend to family members—good advice

No one can foresee every emergency, divorce, or foreclosure. Yet, we can prepare for them. I encourage you to review some of these web sites for more ideas: The Sandwich Generation, GoBankingRates, MarketWatch, SeniorLiving, AXAEquitable, and Kiplinger.

Join us Monday when we begin a series examining planning your career in today’s workplace

Barriers to Retirement 6: Working and Bridging

This continues our series on barriers to retirement by exploring work as a new option (This post should have been published on February 1)

We explored 5 traditional sources to fund your retirement: 1) a pension, 2) Social Security, 3) home equity, 4) savings, and 5) investments. Many people will not find enough money to fund their retirement. Today, we will explore the emerging sixth source of funding retirement—one that will redefine the concept of retirement—working.

I work with a lot of people aged 60-80 years old. We have seen an increase of older workers returning to the workforce. I know of two assisted living communities who appointed an employment specialist to help residents find jobs. I personally know more than 100 people over the age of 75 who went back to work in the past 12 months.

Continuing to Work: Both a Requirement and a Choice

So many senior citizens are returning to the workforce that economist created a title for the phenomenon—bridge employment. Bridging means that you work less hours doing the same job you did before, in some cases for the same employer.

Some retirees must go back to work for financial reasons: insufficient retirement, collapsing investments, medical catastrophes, and problems with other family members that drain their retirement. The Journal of Occupational Health found that seniors that must go back to work enjoy it less and usually must find work in different fields.

Other retirees choose bridge employment health reasons. Anita Gutierrez-Folch quotes Time Magazine’s Wellness blog that people who bridge “may be less likely to face major diseases and more likely to keep up daily functions, compared with those who go straight from a full-time career into full-time retirement.”

Long-life spans constitute another reason many retirees continue to work. They get bored after several years of inactivity. While many find activity in service situations, others choose to return to the work place. They find satisfaction, fulfillment, and purpose in work.

So, whether for financial, health, or entertainment reasons. Work has become the sixth source of retirement. It will be interesting to see how this development affects the decade long prediction that the retiring baby boomers will leave a massive void in the workplace. What if they don’t retire?

Join me later today when I conclude my examination of retirement with some possible solutions

Barriers to Retirement 5: Jeopardized Investments

This continues our series on barriers to retirement (This post should have been published on January 30)

While many depend on the first four elements of retirement: 1) a pension, 2) Social Security, 3) home equity, and 4) savings; most ignore 5) investing. This portion of our series will focus on personal investments .

Teaching Our Children to Invest

Let me illustrate differing approaches to investing. When my son turned 12, we taught him to change his savings from a piggy bank to a credit union account to earn interest. In other words his money would grow. My parents also bought him a share of Euro Disney.

His two best friends had different experiences. One boy’s father introduced him, at age 12, to the piggy bank. Prior to, the boy spent what he received. The second boy had opened his credit union account when he was 8. At 12, his father introduced him to mutual funds and encouraged him to invest $25 a month in mutual funds.

This story represents the difference between people. Some teach their children to save and invest—to make their money work for them and grow. Others teach their children to save and grow at a much smaller rate. Still others do not teach their children anything about money management.

Jeopardized Investments Affect Retirement

Typical investments, for those that do invest, include:

• Mutual funds (group ownership of multiple companies)
• Stocks (shared ownership of corporations)
• Bonds (investments in government and other debt instruments)
• Real estate (commercial, industrial, and residential—but not their prime residence)
• Certificates
• Precious metals, jewels, art, collectables and more
• Other investment tools and instruments

Consider what has happened to each of these types of investments.

In conclusion, most people do not invest, and many that do lost money on their investments. Jeopardized or non-existent investments may be a barrier to retirement. If you did not invest in the past, start now.

Join me later today when I explore "bridging” the new 6th element of retirement