subject: Fill Your Mind With Useful Knowledge For Building A Better Career And Life [print this page] Many people enjoy debating the merits of acquiring so-called street smarts versus academic learning. The former will keep you safe in many dangerous situations while the latter may sometimes only be helpful for earning a good grade on a university examination. The latter may also help you obtain an interview for a job that may paradoxically require lots of the former.
Increasingly, mid-career people are finding that their street smarts aren't enough: Many opportunities are closed to those who don't know the latest theories and advanced practices that are now taught in universities. Even those with good university educations can find that the scope of what they learned in their twenties is too narrow to take them where they want to go now in their personal and working lives.
In addition, anyone who wants to make a career change usually needs to acquire valuable knowledge, from somewhere, on how to succeed in a new field. A lot of time, money, and effort could be saved if those seeking career advancement could quickly acquire street smarts and academic knowledge.
Wouldn't it be great if street smarts and academic knowledge could be combined to provide a powerful dual perspective of practical lessons? With a better sense at forty of what knowledge is valuable to them, many mid-career people can focus new learning in highly productive areas.
Here's an example of choosing the wrong things to study while young. One of my college friends looked like he was thirty, but we were about the same age. As a result of his appearance and his winning personality, Frank had an easy time getting served alcohol in bars, and he took advantage of that access to become a dedicated barfly.
After a hard night of drinking and joking at the bars, Frank liked to eat Chinese food. Bemused by the Chinese characters on the restaurant menus, he decided to study Chinese in college so that he could read the menus without a translation.
Chinese language professors had a different goal in mind: They wanted to create scholars and diplomats with amazing facility in the nuances of academic, political, and diplomatic subjects of interest to Chinese people.
Frank flunked the course. He also dropped out of college due to the setback. Because of his appearance and charm, he snagged a high-paying job operating a crane at a construction site. After work, he still headed to the bars. Although he enjoyed his new life, it was a dead end in terms of career progress. Marriage, a family, and alcoholism lay ahead, and he only did the last aspect of his life with any enthusiasm. It was a great pity.
What's a better path for gaining useful knowledge? I'm sure there's more than one, but let me share one possibility for your consideration:
1. Study what you love in high school and college, whether you intend to apply the lessons for personal enjoyment or for a career.
2. While studying, find out about the careers of those who work at what you love. Ask the people who do that work what practical advice they have for what academic and practical knowledge will be helpful.
3. Take internships and jobs during vacations that let you see firsthand what the related work is like.
4. Engage in the activities for fun during your personal time and continue to do so for the rest of your life.
5. Before committing to extended graduate study, work at what you think you love most for a year or two.
6. If you like the work, go on to do graduate work in that field. If you don't like it all that much, try working in other appealing areas until you find work that fills you with passion.
7. Make a commitment to work in your intended area for five to ten years to see how well it fits you. While doing this, learn more about what people who are older do in this field. Examine your feelings about such future work.
8. Keep up-to-date on attractive new kinds of careers and pastimes when they open up.
9. Within the first ten years of working in your chosen field, decide if you want to continue or if you would like to shift to another field.
10. In either case, go back to school part-time to upgrade your useful knowledge in areas that enhance your personal and professional lives.
The benefits of this path may surprise you. To help you appreciate what may follow, let me introduce you to one of my former students, someone who successfully used mid-career education to fill in some of the blanks in her knowledge canvas, Mrs. Charlotte Burgmans.
In high school, Mrs. Burgmans was on a fast-track scholastic course leading toward university studies. However, falling in love with a young man from another country caused her to shift her plans to finding a course of study that would get her into that other country as soon as possible, being an executive secretary to senior business managers.
This decision proved to be a mistake when she often found the work boring, leading to frequent job changes. During those jobs, she took a number of courses and seminars in marketing, public relations, and project management.
Finally, Mrs. Burgmans landed a job in public relations with a large pension fund where she could work on advancing her career, rather than that of her bosses. She liked the work and had an opportunity to work in many different aspects of public relations, marketing, policy making, and key account management.
Over time, her assignments gravitated into leading major projects, something she enjoyed very much. The 13 years she spent in this line of work were mostly rewarding, but the last 3 didn't satisfy her as much as before. She was reluctant to look for another job because her job was part-time and she had limited academic training in that type of work.
Mrs. Burgmans' boss gave her a valuable tip when he suggested that she get some help with planning the next steps in her career. Mentored by an external consulting firm, she became more aware of how her personality, style, and strengths were different from those of other people and how she could make the most of her special characteristics.
After Mrs. Burgmans' family moved from Europe to the United States, she could not take a job due to visa restrictions. She used that restriction to explore the visually creative part of her interests, something she had been expressing through painting and design work.
She also decided this was a good time to fill in the academic information that she had missed by initially studying to be an executive secretary. Due to her business experience, she wanted to avoid taking the kind of elementary classes that are required of college students.
Fortunately, Mrs. Burgmans was able to parlay her experience into being admitted to an MBA program where she investigated ways to advance her artistic career while getting a better sense of the potential for that career compared to other creative outlets.
After graduation, Mrs. Burgmans realized that she enjoyed innovative thinking and problem solving that required creative approaches as much as or more than she did working creatively in the visual arts. Aided by more knowledge about marketing and management, she realized that she had the skills, knowledge, and credentials to make a career shift into work related to such innovative thinking.
She also gained confidence to take on new challenges. Her on-going work in visual arts also took a more productive direction after she better understood the marketing issues involved and potential solutions.
At the present time, Mrs. Burgmans is developing a new business career to benefit from her new-found perspectives. In doing so, she is more firmly committed than ever before to engaging in what she can do effectively in activities that she loves to do. Those sound like good lessons for all of us, don't they?
