#6: How to career 'prototype' (and find your next field)

“How do I choose my next field after academia?”

If you’re asking yourself this question, you need to try ‘prototyping’.

Today I’ll share a 6 step process to unlock the power of this approach.

Here’s what the process looks like:

1. Investigate quickly and pick your first experiment.
2. Learn the basics of the field.
3. Talk with a handful of people in the field.
4. Get your hands dirty with a project.
5. Make an assessment after one month.
6. Then ask yourself the big question: should I continue for 2-3 months or switch?

Investigate quickly and pick your first experiment.

Explore for a bit online and through your network.

If you're in the humanities, check out my infographic on industry roles held by humanities PhDs.

Identify 4-5 potential fields or roles. Read up on them.

Pick whichever one interests you the most. This is an experiment, so there’s no such thing as picking the “wrong” one.

Don’t make the mistake I did and spin your wheels for years on this step.

Learn the basics

Pretend you’ve made a long-term choice and start upskilling. Adopt the mindset that you ARE going to move into this field.

Use your research skills online to find key books, bloggers, LinkedIn voices, YouTube creators, etc. relevant to the field.

Consume this content. Absorb everything you can.

If you find yourself bored or demotivated by it, go back to step one.

Don’t abandon the field because you lack skills or seems it hard or you don’t understand it. Be careful of listening to your fears too early.

But do bail out if you don’t find it energizing or it’s clearly not a good fit for you.

Talk to people

Start holding informational interviews with people in the field. Aim for a handful.

Use these to better understand and assess the field. Generate smart questions from you upskilling in the previous step.

But also check: are you clicking with people in this field?

You don’t need to find a field where everyone is exactly like you. But can you imagine these people being your friends and your broader network? Would you enjoy these people as colleagues?

If you feel like you’ve found “your people” while exploring a type of role, that’s a good sign. It's necessary, of course. Your main goal is to understand the day-to-day work and the skills people use.

Finally, use these chats, plus your research, to identify the key skills for breaking into the field in the first place. You’ll use this info in the next step.

Get your hands dirty

Ask yourself what is the smallest way to experiment by doing the actual work of the field. Then go do that.

Build something yourself. Create a sample eLearning course. Run a small research project through user interviews. Plan and track a project like a project manager would. Etc.

Volunteer for a non profit or a friend. Shadow someone. Offer to work free for a local business. Do some freelance work.

Feel what it’s like to do the work.

Assess after a month

After a month, it’s time for an honest assessment.

Are you energized? Do you hit flow? What parts of the work and the field don’t work for you?

Maybe you love nerding out over doing research. But do you enjoy managing stakeholders, trying to influence colleagues, unrealistic deadlines, participant recruitment headaches, cleaning dodgy survey results, interviewing customers all day, etc.?

Being a UX Researcher might not be the right choice for you even if you like researching in general. But you won’t know until you get into the thick of it - at least in small ways.

So ask yourself, what do you like the most and the least of the experiment so far?

Ask the Big Question

Now make a decision.

Should you keep experimenting with this field? Or do you need to try something else?

Put another way, ask yourself: “Should I continue this experiment for 2 more months?”

You’ll notice that I’m not having you ask “should I get started?” You have to start!

But now you’ve done some learning, networking, and hands-on experimenting. Now you ahve data. The important question is reflecting on whether you should continue.

Or try something else.

If the answer is that you need to try something else, celebrate your progress. You’ve now gained some incredibly valuable insights into yourself and your career.

Use these learnings to select your next potential role or field for the next experiment.

The key to prototyping

The key is to DO the actual work.

Make small bets. There’s no big loss if something turns out to be the wrong avenue. But you’ll also never know if a field is right for you if you sit on the sidelines trying to evaluate it from a distance.

I did a version of this prototyping with programming and then non-profit fund raising before I truly clicked with instructional design.

Turn your research skills on yourself and your potential field.

Run experiments. Then you’ll have data to make a good decision!

And your decision doesn’t have to be perfect.

Just keep moving in the general right direction and you can refine your course as you go.

And remember, there’s no such thing as failure or wasted time with prototyping.

You’ve got this!