For the vast majority of college freshmen, their studying energy has been mainly focused on the highly competitive entrance examinations in the past, such as the high school entrance examination and the college entrance examination. So their understanding of “career planning” is almost “a blank paper”.
So, freshmen who are “a blank paper”, are about to enter a new and unfamiliar environment. How to make career planning? What is the way to do career planning? In my opinion, the diversity of individuals leads to no set of career planning methods suitable for everyone, but there is a set of career planning methodologies that can “empower” individuals and allow individuals to create a set of career planning methods that suit them.
The methodology I want to propose this time is called “Career Calibration”
My undergraduate major was mechanical engineering, but when I enrolled in the university program, my only relevant professional knowledge about it was: I have watched the Transformers movie series and once helped high school classmates to fix their desk lamps. It can be said that I am also “a blank paper”. To fulfill a memorable university life, especially with many honors, I also consulted on various online and offline platforms at the beginning of my university life.
During the freshman year and sophomore year, you should participate in a varies of activities and student administrative jobs. You should bravely try new things and cultivate innovative thinking, to broaden your eyesight. Based on that, during the junior year and senior year, you should find a specialization that you want to develop from your expanded previous experiences and concentrate on the specialization.
This sentence provide me with a good “methodology” to develop my university career, so I tried to use this methodology to find a set of college career planning that suits me.
When I was a freshman and a sophomore, I actively participated in art clubs, technology clubs, and various volunteer activities based on my curiosity, in addition to completing the designated learning tasks. At the beginning of the second year of sophomore year, after I had some contacts in the club and the college, I tried to establish a volunteering association to hold activities. The association developed very well in the following years. In addition, I have participated in competitions with members of a technological innovation club and won some prizes as a team.
At this time, although I have achieved good results in extracurricular activities, I have not made any outstanding achievements in my specialization. As a result, I once thought that I should transfer to business specialization after completing my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering because it seems that I am good at doing business jobs rather than doing engineering jobs.
In the second semester of my sophomore year, I found that many of my classmates started to contact professors for scientific research projects. This was an alarm for me who had not yet established a scientific research direction.
I hand my volunteering association to some juniors, and I left all previous university clubs and looked around for scientific research projects. Through the contacts of scientific research resources accumulated in the past two years, I participated in a research project related to “the 3D printer”, which was very popular at the time. At the same time, plans for internships are also being implemented steadily.
In my senior year, my association and its derived entrepreneurial projects had some turmoil in the university, which made me temporarily shelve the idea of transferring from engineering to business, and made up my mind to go abroad and do a good job in scientific research. After some previous scientific research and internship experience, I tentatively set my future development direction as intelligent transportation and autonomous driving, and I also applied for a master’s degree in related majors, thus ending my university life.
Making choices, and deciding when to make them, is not an easy task. From choosing a career to choosing a lifelong partner, “making the best choice” for these problems is an active research direction. Among them, one “Optimal Stopping Problem” caught my attention.
Optimal Stopping Problem, similar to the secretary problem, the marriage problem, the sultan’s dowry problem, etc.
Secretary problem: To recruit a secretary, there are N candidates. Every time a person is interviewed, you must decide whether to hire him (her) after the interview. If he or she is not hired at that time, he or she will not come back.
Without choosing any strategy, some people choose a secretary early on. However, when they see that the latter candidates have better qualifications, they regret it. Some people will always hesitate to choose, but the candidates will become more and more dissatisfied with the qualification later, and they will also regret it.
So, what is the optimal selection strategy?
One algorithm adopted a strategy: reject the first r-1 people, then interview the remaining n-r+1 people, and if any of the interviewers are better than the previous ones, hire that person. Through a series of mathematical calculations and computer simulations, we got a number: 0.368. The meaning of this number is: 100 people come to the interview, and the 36th or 37th person has the highest probability of being the best candidate. Therefore, the point of 0.368 is also known as the “optimal stopping point” of the classical secretary problem.
Secratary Problem | WikipediaIn career planning, we can apply this number to a variety of scenarios:
Considering 4 years of undergraduate study, the best stopping point is 4*0.368=1.472, which is the start of the second semester of sophomore year.
If we choose 23 to 35 years old as the rising period of personal career, then the best stopping point is 23+(35–23)*0.368=27.416, which is about 27 and a half years old.
If we choose 18 to 63 years old as the full period of a personal career, then the best stopping point is 18+(63–18)*0.368=34.56, which is about 34 and a half years old.
However, these stopping points are only numbers, we must give meaning to these numbers in our career planning.
Perhaps we can explain the strategy adopted by this algorithm in the language of career planning:
In the first 36.8% part of our careers, we explore, observe, communicate, think more, and make fewer important career decisions. In this way, we can make ourselves aware of the people and things we will experience throughout our lives, especially: what level of people will we work with in the future? What kind of things will come into contact with in the future, and make an expectation. That way, we’re able to measure who and what happens in our careers after the sweet spot. Of course, if we later come across a co-worker or industry opportunity that “exceeds our expectations”, we will confidently choose it as part of our career.
Optimal stopping is a one-way choice problem. For example, if one person chooses to work in an industry, it will not interfere with other people choosing or not choosing to work in the same industry. However, if it is a two-way choice between candidates and recruiters, which affects each other, then it involves the “stable matching problem”.
In 1962, economists David Gale and Lloyd Shapley asked whether it is possible to design an algorithm that can self-execute to obtain the best match for some common matching problems in life. One of the most classic men and women matching problems is: given a list of N males and N females’ preferences towards matching, please use an algorithm to find a stable matching. The corresponding solution algorithm is the Gale-Shapley algorithm: this algorithm assumes that men propose to women in descending order of preference, but once a woman finds a mate, she will no longer be single, but will only be replaced with a better one.
The results of this algorithm have many properties: one of the properties we can notice is that men will be assigned the best legitimate mate, but women will be assigned the worst legitimate mate.
The practical significance of this theory is those who initiate the proposal will always gain the benefit.Stable Marriage Problem | Wikipedia
After the above introduction and analysis of the algorithms related to optimal stopping, I would like to assign the point of 0.368 as the “Career Calibration Point”: before this point, we continue to explore externally, and get in touch with different people and things, and remind yourself: always summarize how the world going on and what’s the trend around you. After this point, we will make the previous valuable exploration experience into a “career ruler”. This “career ruler” can mark the people and things we meet in the future, to help us make career decisions more confidently.
With this “career ruler”, why can we be more confident in career decisions in the future? It is because this career calibration point is the optimal solution calculated by us through mathematical reasoning and deduction, and it is our subjective “most deterministic arrangement” that we have made under the condition of our existing ability.
However, we cannot simply use the number 0.368 rigidly, only as a reference. After all, career planning is not a natural science, while rigor will lead to rigidity. On the one hand, the real situation is more complicated than this mathematical simulation. On the other hand, people themselves and the environment are constantly changing, and their careers are also uneven, that is, the weights of careers in different periods will be different.
In addition, after the above introduction and analysis of the algorithms related to the best match, I believe that the ability to actively explore a career is more important than the ability to make optimal career decisions. Those who are brave and take the initiative to explore careers, take the initiative to match each other, and actively strive for it, can gain more advantages in career development than those who are afraid of “uncertainty” and passively make decisions. Rather than what many people think “people who make the decision always have the advantage”.
When we make career planning, especially when we come to a new field and don’t know much about the environment and surroundings, we should follow the three-step methodology of exploration-calibration-evaluation:
1. First and foremost, we stimulate our enthusiasm to actively learn and explore new people and things in the outside world.
2. Second, at the expected “career benchmark”, we summarize the experience of the previous exploration and make a “career ruler” to measure future expectations.
3. Finally, we use this “career ruler” to measure the people and things we meet in the future to help us make career decisions.
In the first season of Undercover Billionaire, the billionaire Glenn Stearns came to Erie, an unfamiliar town with $100, an old truck, and a phone number without any contacts. Without using his identity as a billionaire and any related information, he should create a local $1 million business in 90 days, his strategy is:
1. Exploration: Actively explore local industrial development, take the initiative to find local entrepreneurial resources, and take the initiative to connect with local people.
2. Calibration: Based on the previous explorations, summarize the information he learned. Gleen has investigated coffee shops, beer bars, and barbecue restaurants. Through a series of analyses, he decides to be a barbecue restaurant that sells beer.
3. Evaluation: In the process of project execution, he uses the ruler to measure the people and things around him to help him make decisions. When Glenn sees that RJ doesn’t concentrate on his work, Glenn invites everyone to see Matt’s deployment results, and use Matt’s work to measure RJ’s work, which makes RJ realize his shortcomings, thus RJ speeding up the project progress.
Career exploration is the foremost and the hardest action.
During the exploratory period of career calibration, I allocated more time to actively participate in different new activities, actively talk to other people, and actively interact with other people through social media. The brave encounter with new things satisfies my curiosity and increases my knowledge.
But the process of exploration is arduous, especially when you try to reach a new group of people, I am often very sensitive: how will others evaluate me? Sometimes I was treated as a guest, and sometimes I was treated as an invader.
During countless times I was desolated by others, teased by others, and disgusted by some people’s inexplicable sense of superiority.
I have been speculated by various people only because I have some differences compared to them. Even the common good character of being helpful is understood by some people as an “excuse to harass us with malicious intentions”. Interest in the education specialization is “love lecturing on his soapbox”, and rarely peacockish compare food and clothing is “living in poverty”, countless examples like these in my experience. The more you want to try, the more you want to explore, and the more you actively contact different types of people, the more setbacks you will encounter. I have doubted myself about this kind of “active exploration” decision many times: Birds of a feather flock together, those who have different beliefs should not work, why do I forcibly connect these different groups to myself?
And in the process of my exploration, the continuous and rapid changes in the surrounding environment, or turbulence, are also affecting my mind. In the process of exploration, I have made many mistakes, suffered a lot of losses, done many crazy actions, hurt others, and hurt myself.
The greatest significance of the career-calibration methodology to me is that all past experiences, whether good or bad, victory or defeat, joy or pain, form an integral part of my life. I have also been trapped in the animosity of some people and things in the past, sometimes even endless. But when I look back at the expected “calibration moment”, the passage of time has taken away all the merits and demerits. Gold can be seen on the beach when the big waves wash away the sand. In the past exploration period, those people and things that have inspired and tempered me have formed part of the scale of my future career scale. Using this “career ruler”, I can try to quantify what happened to the people I meet in my future career into a special kind of data. In the future, these quantified “data” can increase the certainty of my future expectations, so that I can make more rational and correct career decisions.