“How to make tough career decisions” by Benjamin Todd

Should I quit my job? Which of my offers should I take? Which long-term options should I explore?

These decisions will affect how you spend years of your time, so the stakes are high. But they’re also an area where you shouldn’t expect your intuition to be a reliable guide. This means it’s worth taking a more systematic approach.

What might a good career decision process look like? A common approach is to make a pro and con list, but it’s possible to do a lot better. Pro and con lists make it easy to put too much weight on an unimportant factor. More importantly, they don’t encourage you to make use of the most powerful decision-making methods, which can greatly improve the quality of your decisions.

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Outline:

(01:45) Step 1. Clarify your decision

(02:03) Step 2. Write out your most important priorities

(04:51) Step 3. Generate options

(06:59) Step 4. Rank your options

(07:16) Step 5. List your key uncertainties

(08:13) Step 6. Go and investigate

(11:06) Step 7. Make your final assessment

(16:33) Step 8. Make your best guess, and then prepare to adapt

(20:34) Step 9. Take action

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First published:
August 27th, 2015

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-decision/article