It’s impossible to know if you’ll really like a career direction until you try it out. To avoid making costly mistakes—and wasting your energy—take a test-drive. Here, you’ll read about people who apprenticed, volunteered, or job shadowed to discover their professional identities—and you’ll learn how to find these experiences for yourself.
Apprenticing
Joanne Chang was swept into her first job when she graduated from Harvard in 1991. Because she’d majored in math and economics, “it seemed natural to go into investment banking or management consulting,” she recalls. When a blue-chip management-consulting firm offered her a job, she grabbed it. But two years later—much of it spent on the road, advising companies spanning every industry from insurance to telecom—she knew it wasn’t her calling.
She’d always been interested in cooking and baking—at Harvard, she’d been known as the Chocolate Chip Cookie Girl—so she decided to give that a try instead. “I sent a bunch of letters to chefs in town I didn’t know, but I knew their reputation,” she says. “I said, ‘I have no formal training, but I love cooking and I’m interested in getting into the restaurant world, and I’ll take any position.’”
Impressed with her chutzpah, intrigued by her résumé, and short an employee who had just left, Boston power chef Lydia Shire called Chang literally the next day and invited her for an interview. Chang got a job as a “bottom-of-the-ladder prep cook,” tutored by a sous chef who “trained me and showed me recipes and what I needed to do—how to set up the station, what the dishes should look like.” After three months, she worked her way up to her first job as a line cook.
The transition wasn’t easy. “It’s grimy, hard physical labor,” she says. “It can be mundane—and there’s a lot of stress.” But she soon realized the food industry was where she wanted to be. “I remember clearly telling one of my consulting friends how exciting it was to be surrounded by people who were passionate about their work. When you cook, you’re not making any money, so when you do it, it’s with people who are there because they love cooking.” And her work in the kitchen had a clear, direct impact. “You make a terrine, you slice it up, put it on a plate, and the server comes back and says they loved the terrine. It was an immediate gratification I hadn’t had up to that point in my career.”
Today, Chang is the impresario behind Flour—a chain of seven acclaimed bakeries in the Boston area—and a co-owner (with her husband, Christopher Myers) of the upscale Asian restaurant Myers + Chang. Now she’s on the other side of the equation, hiring (as Lydia Shire did) people of all ages wanting to break into the restaurant industry—and she’s more convinced than ever that apprenticeships are critical. “There are misconceptions about what it’s like to be in the food business,” says Chang. “It’s imperative to spend some time working in the field before making a jump.”
Volunteering
If you can spare your nights and weekends—or do without a paycheck for a short period—try volunteering as a way to illuminate possibilities. As executive coach Rebecca Zucker points out, volunteering “allows you to network with a new group of people in your target area. It allows you to keep your skill set fresh or build a new skill set. It’s something you can put on a résumé—and it shows your commitment to a particular path.” Zucker recalls one client who wanted to break into clean tech—a popular career in Silicon Valley that was hard to get started in without previous experience. “He volunteered to do research for a private equity firm on a certain niche within clean tech,” she says. “Not only did he learn a ton and have something to put on his résumé, but it was also instrumental in helping him get a job in the field.”
Deborah Shah had a similarly valuable experience volunteering in state politics. She’d always enjoyed politics but strictly as an observer: “I would typically watch the morning shows on Sunday, read the morning paper—I knew what was going on in the world but not as an insider.” After feeling especially moved by a gubernatorial candidate’s speech, she decided to get involved in his campaign. She showed up at headquarters and was given the most basic grunt work: making phone calls to voters. But she earned trust—and greater responsibility—because she was “the phone banker who showed up every day.” Eventually, the campaign asked her to organize a senate district, then another, and Shah finally became a regional field director. She worked on the campaign for 11 months, unpaid, but in the process she discovered a passion: “I was interested in persuading people to vote. I really liked campaigning.”
After the campaign ended, she learned something else: She’d made a name for herself. A state representative she’d met on the trail was headed for a special election and wanted her to run his campaign. When she helped him win, other calls poured in. In the past five years, she’s headed races for governor, state senator, city councillor, and U.S. senator.
Volunteering can be beneficial even within your own company. New York–based coach Alisa Cohn suggests stepping up for committees that will allow you to build connections in different departments. “You can volunteer for any press function or global committee. It might feel thankless, but what you’re getting is a broader network and the experience of doing something different. It’s especially good if you feel like you’ve been boxed in or pigeonholed. If you’re in engineering or finance and you want to get more experience in marketing or strategic planning, they can’t stop you, because you’re volunteering.”
Volunteering also helps you find out what you don’t want to do. The summer after I graduated from college—thinking a career in public relations sounded exciting—I landed at a boutique PR firm in Washington, D.C., that specialized in education issues. By test-driving the field with an entry-level job—which consisted largely of cold-calling disinterested reporters—I learned that PR was not where I wanted to end up.
Job Shadowing
Occasionally, a day working in a field is all it takes. One coach recalls a web designer client who “liked design but couldn’t stand spending five days a week in front of the computer.” Looking for a creative career that included more interaction with people, she became interested in floral design and read about it extensively. She did 10 informational interviews in the field and, convinced it was right for her, agreed to her coach’s suggestion to shadow someone for a day. “At the end of the morning,” the coach remembers, “she had three questions: Is the room always cold? Is the floor always cement? And are you always on your feet? And the guy said, ‘The room is always cold because we have to keep the flowers fresh, the floor is cement because I’m dropping wet flowers on it, and I’m always on my feet because we’re moving around and delivering flowers.’ And that was the end of that.”
For those who’d like more immersion—or whose dream jobs aren’t located nearby—there’s Vocation Vacations, a company that allows participants to test-drive more than 125 careers. Say you’d like to be an alpaca rancher. If you don’t know any personally, you can pay $849, head to Oregon, and work side by side with a real-life ranch mentor for two days.
If you want to make any kind of professional leap—even if it’s to something less esoteric, like becoming a freelance writer—it’s essential to do your “personal and professional due diligence,” says Vocation Vacations founder Brian Kurth. “It’s doing your homework and getting questions answered that you didn’t know you needed to ask,” he says. “One question I always have clients ask mentors is ‘What do you know now that you didn’t know when you launched your business?’ The goal is for the clients not to make the same mistakes—to hit the road faster.”
Work for Free If You Can
Life is not fair. One shining example of that is the fact that you’ll probably get the best opportunities if you work for free. It’s not always necessary—Joanne Chang got hired as a paid prep cook and received on-the-job training. But let’s be clear: Without experience, you’ll be starting at the bottom and making a meager salary even if you are remunerated.
There’s an upside, though: You may have a better opportunity to gain meaningful skills if you work for free because once employers start forking over cash, they often want grunt work for their money. If you’re working gratis, your employer can afford to deploy you on long-range, strategic projects that wouldn’t otherwise get done.
I certainly had that experience during my college internship days. When I worked for free at a D.C.-based advocacy group, my boss toted me along to key meetings and let me work on substantive research projects. The following two summers, I was incredibly proud to be hired for elite paid internship programs (at the aforementioned PR firm in D.C. and at a New York City–based advertising agency). But as I endured an endless array of menial assignments, it felt as if they wanted to soak me for every minute their five dollars an hour could buy. I made about $3,000 each summer—enough to pay rent—but I learned a lot less.