Test your career hypotheses...

When you first begin the process of professional exploration, there is a lot you don’t know. You probably have a hypothesis in your head about the kind of work you want and the kind of work you’d be good at. But your hypothesis may be false. Informational interviewing is how you find out.

Informational interviewing is a recursive process of exploration and discovery. You are gathering data, and adding that data to your mental model of the world. It’s essential work because without an accurate mental model it’s hard to develop a good hypothesis.

If you are very young or very inexperienced in the professional world your mental model is probably not very accurate. But even people who are further along in their careers can have inaccurate mental models, especially if they have stayed entirely in one industry or role. An elementary school teacher, for example, may have a highly accurate mental model of the world of K-12 education but know little of the world beyond. This could be a problem for her if she decided she’s tired of teaching and wants to try something new.

Fortunately, informational interviewing is an extremely straightforward way of improving your mental model of the world. As you learn more about the world, you can refine your understanding of what you’re looking for and how to get it. It’s a multi-layered recursive cycle of asking and answering questions. Here’s basically how it works.

1. Identify your hypothesis: You have an idea that you’re interested in a company, a role, or an industry. For this exercise, let's say you think you might like to be a marketing manager. So your hypothesis could be something like “I’d enjoy being a marketing manager”

2. Identify people who can help you validate your hypothesis: Now that you have your hypothesis you can make a list of people who can give you more data points. You’ve probably already googled “marketing manager” so you need to talk to people with on-the-ground experience. So you’ll likely be reaching out to people who are already marketing managers or people who employ marketing managers (like marketing directors or people in head of marketing roles).

3. Reach out to the people you’ve identified and interview them: The next step is interviewing the people you’ve identified. During your interview with them you can ask them what their job is like, what they like about it or don’t like about it, how they got the job, etc… Honestly, people generally enjoy talking about themselves and their work, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get them talking. All you have to do is take it in. When you’re done with the conversation you can and should take notes about what you learned.

4. Add the information you’ve gathered to your mental model and assess how it affects your hypothesis: Perhaps you’re surprised to learn that marketing managers spend most of their time using project management tools to coordinate the many moving parts of a marketing campaign. You’re a creative soul who wants to spend time thinking about how companies talk about themselves and tell their stories. If that’s the case, you’ll likely discover quickly that that’s a brand manager, not a marketing manager. You now think your original hypothesis is false. Instead, based on new information, you think “I’d enjoy being a brand manager.”On the other hand, maybe you interviewed a marketing manager and you thought to yourself, “Yes! This is exactly what I want to be doing!” Great, you are on the right track. Now you should focus your inquiry on what you need to do to get a job as a marketing manager.

5. Repeat the process. If you modify your hypothesis to “I think I’d like to be a brand manager,” the next step is to repeat this process to test the accuracy of that hypothesis.

Note: the only way to fully test your hypothesis is to actually do the thing you’re thinking of doing. In this case that would mean becoming a marketing manager. But taking a job as a marketing manager is a pretty high-cost way to decide if you want to be a marketing manager. You should try to determine with a reasonably high degree of confidence if you’d enjoy being a marketing manager before you take that step. But let’s assume you talk to a bunch of brand managers and you’re feeling really good about the idea of becoming a brand manager. In that case, the only way to test out your hypothesis is to go ahead and get a job as a brand manager.

It’s not the end of the world if you take a job and later learn that you don’t like the role or industry. In fact, this will likely happen at some point. But if you’re not super confident in your commitment to a role or industry you shouldn’t make expensive or life-changing choices based on what is an unvalidated interest. Perhaps the worst example of over-investing in an under-validated career choice is going to graduate school before you’re sure you want to do the thing you’re going to graduate school for. Graduate school is a very bad way to test whether you want a job in any given industry: it takes a long time and it’s really expensive. I knew a woman in my early twenties who was $60,000 in debt after getting a master's degree in public health. The unfortunate thing: she realized too late that she has no interest in public health. Based on anecdotal evidence, this is relatively common. A non-trivial number of people seem to go to graduate school because they don’t know what to do with their life and they want to feel like they are doing something. Don’t do this. You will regret it.