Mother is a job.

An impossible job. A hard job. The most important job there is. And unlike most jobs, there is no training program, no performance review, no clear metric for success, and absolutely no clocking out.

You do it anyway.

And you do it in whatever form it takes. The mother who stayed home. The mother who went back to work. The mother who went back to school while raising children. The mother who built a life piece by piece in the spaces between everything else that needed her. The stepmother who showed up for children who did not pick her and chose to love and care for them anyway. The woman who never got the title but showed up anyway, nurturing and loving and giving in all the ways that matter, whether the world called her mother or not.

Every version of this job is hard. None of them is harder than the others. They are just different kinds of hard.

Motherhood does not have one version of hard. It has many.

There is the hard of the early years. The physical relentlessness of small children who need everything from you all the time and have no concept of your limits because you are, to them, simply the person who is always there. The exhaustion that does not respond to sleep. The love that is so enormous it is almost frightening.

There is the hard of being home. The work that is invisible because it does not come with a paycheck or a title or anyone asking how your day was. The mental load that runs in the background of every other thing you do. The unpaid labor that is no less valuable for being unpaid and no less exhausting for being unacknowledged.

There is the hard of the working parent. Or the parent working. Both, usually, at the same time. Trying to figure out which version of yourself you are supposed to be when the demands of a career and the demands of a family are both legitimate and both relentless and both pulling in different directions at once.

For me, work has been integral to my mental health and wellbeing as a mother. Having something that is mine, a professional identity, time spent outside the walls of my home, has made me a better parent. That is my truth and I own it without apology. And I would not trade a single moment of time at home with my kids for anything in the world. Both things are true. And finding the right balance has been hard.

For other mothers, being present and home is what makes them whole. That is equally valid and equally worthy of respect.

There is no universal right choice. There is only the choice that fits your life, your values, and your circumstances. Give yourself permission to make it without apology. And extend that same grace to every other mother making a different one.

I did not understand any of this until I became one.

My mother had seven children and a life that required her to rebuild it, several times. She went back to school in her thirties. Finished her degree. Raised my younger siblings largely on her own. Worked full time while raising kids. Built a career, piece by piece, in the spaces between everything else that needed her.

I did not understand any of this when I was living inside it. I was a child. I lacked perspective. I saw a mom wearing frumpy dresses who was tired and stretched and managing more than one person should have to manage, and I filed it away somewhere without fully understanding what I was seeing.

I understand it now. Because I am a mother.

I also had a stepmother who helped raise me. That role, showing up for children who did not pick you and choosing to love and care for them anyway, is its own particular brand of hard. Quiet hard. Often thankless hard. I have been a stepmother too. It is hard. I know what it asks of you. And I know how rarely it gets acknowledged the way it deserves.

And then there are the women who never received the title but earned every bit of what it means. The aunt who showed up. The neighbor who became family. The mentor, the friend, the woman who stepped in and loved someone else’s child with the fullness of a mother’s heart. You may not be called mother. But you know who you are. And so do the people whose lives you changed.

You are doing your best. That is enough.

To all the women and mothers out there, you are doing an impossible job. You are doing it imperfectly, the way all impossible jobs get done, with love and exhaustion and occasional doubt and the quiet, persistent hope that you are getting enough of it right.

You are.

My mother did. I know that clearly now, from the other side of it, with the perspective I did not have as a child. The woman in the frumpy dresses who was tired and stretched and managing more than one person should have to manage was also, all along, doing something remarkable. I just was not old enough to see it yet.

To every version of mom out there, happy Mother’s Day. Thank you for doing your best. It is an impossibly hard job. And you are doing it anyway.

I recently ran into a friend. I asked how things were going.

He paused. And then he said something I have not been able to stop thinking about.

“I’ve never loved what I do more. But I’ve never liked my job less.”

He works at a large technology company. He loves his boss. He loves the team he leads. He loves the actual work, the problems he gets to solve, the people he gets to develop. He loves what he is doing more than ever before in his professional life. And yet something is off. He does not like his job.

I could not stop thinking about it. Not just because of my friend, but because this is exactly what I have been covering in my Career and Life Planning class this past week. The timing was almost too good.

The best way I can put it is this: fully engaged in the work, deeply miserable in the job. My friend is not alone in feeling this way. Not even close. This is what I warn my students about. The hard part is that it is difficult to understand, relate to, or prepare for if you have never lived it. Here is what I hope they remember when they need it. Because they will need it.

The distinction that most career conversations miss.

There is a difference between loving your work and liking your job. Most career advice never makes that distinction clearly enough.

Your work is what you actually do. The problems you solve, the people you serve, the skills you use, the contribution you make. Your job is the full context in which you do that work. The organization. The culture. The leadership above you. The structural pressures bearing down on you. The direction the company is heading and whether it aligns with where you thought you were going.

Career exploration, understanding your strengths, interests, values, and goals, is designed to help you find the right work. It is not designed to help you navigate what happens when the right work ends up in the wrong workplace.

And far less attention gets paid to what happens after you find the right work and land somewhere that used to fit and then slowly stops.

That slowly stops is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Because it is rarely dramatic. It is gradual. A reorg here. A leadership change there. A shift in priorities that nobody announced but everyone felt. And one day you look up and realize the place you chose is not quite the place you are in anymore.

What the data says is happening right now.

My friend’s experience is not just personal. It is structural.

When Gallup asked managers what changes their organization made in 2023, 64 percent said employees were given additional job responsibilities, 51 percent cited the restructuring of teams, and 42 percent reported budget cuts. Managers now have more work to do on a tighter budget with new teams. And manager engagement fell from 30 percent in 2023 to 27 percent in 2024, with the sharpest drops among female managers and managers under 35.

The finding that most directly describes what my friend shared with me is this: employees are most favorable when it comes to the meaning of their work and their relationships with the people on their teams. On the flip side, employees respond most unfavorably to the transactional aspects of work, compensation, stress, and workload.

The pattern is consistent: the work is fine. The job is breaking people.

Gallup calls it the manager squeeze, managers caught between aligning with new directives from leaders and meeting the changing expectations of their employees. During times of organizational change, that is a recipe for burnout.

The technology sector, where my friend works, has been hit particularly hard. The global tech sector eliminated over 244,000 jobs in 2025 alone, with restructuring, acquisitions, shifting priorities, and the relentless pressure of a sector reorienting itself around AI all cited as driving factors. The result is an environment where the work can still be meaningful and the job can still be miserable, simultaneously, without contradiction.

Career exploration is where it starts. Career navigation is everything after.

Here is something worth adding to this career conversation, because it is an element that does not get nearly enough attention.

Career exploration is where everything begins. It is the foundation. It is what my book Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration is built around. But it is actually just the beginning.

Everything that follows is career navigation. And career navigation never stops, because the variables never stop changing. You change. Your values evolve. What fit at 25 looks different at 35, and different again at 45 and 55. Your circumstances change. The world changes. The organization you joined is not always the organization you are still in.

My friend did not make a wrong career decision. He made a good one. What changed is everything around that work, the organizational context that either supports or quietly undermines fulfillment, regardless of how good the work itself is.

That is a career navigation problem. It requires the same self-examination that career exploration required at the beginning. The same questions. The same tools. A new set of answers. And sometimes, if that examination reveals the fit is genuinely broken beyond repair, it circles back into career exploration again. That is not failure. It is a normal part of the process. Annoying? Absolutely. But completely normal.

My friend did not ask for my advice.

But if you are reading this, whether that is him or someone who recognized themselves in this story, I will assume you are looking for more than just validation that the problem is real.

It starts with one question: is this the work, or something else? Both require the same process of self-examination. The difference is that career exploration works with the best information you had before real experience began. Career navigation works with everything you have actually lived. That is not a small distinction. It means you know yourself in a way your younger self could only guess at.

A side note to employers. And yes, I see you lurking back there.

CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CCOs, managers, owners, and anyone whose business card has a C and an O on it, this one is for you.

There is a real possibility that someone on your team right now is my friend. Talented, committed, genuinely excellent at what they do, and quietly struggling with the workplace around that work in ways they do not know how to say out loud.

Consider this my voluntary service as the awkward middle person. Think of me like a career counselor who accidentally ended up in an HR meeting, in lieu of a high-priced talent retention consultant.

Your employees love the work. Some of them are struggling with the job. Those are two very different problems with two very different solutions. One of them is fixable. The other one ends in an exit interview.

Let’s try to avoid that meeting.

To my students.

If you stumble across this article years from now when you are deep in your career and something feels off, remember what we talked about in class. Career navigation uses the same tools as career exploration. The answers are just different now, because the life you are examining is the one you are actually living.

You know how to do this.

Remember, loving what you do and liking your job are not the same thing. And the gap between them is worth examining, on a regular basis, for as long as you are working.

My friend is in the middle of that decision right now. I do not know what he will choose. But he is asking himself the right questions.

That is always where it starts.

College is a scam. The job market is impossible. Gen Z is the least prepared workforce in history. High schools are failing. Parents are failing. Everyone is failing, all at once, in every direction, simultaneously. Oh, and AI is going to take whatever jobs are left.

It is exhausting just reading about it. Imagine being seventeen and trying to live it.

Here is what I want to say to every parent, educator, and panicked adult in the room right now.

All is not lost.

Here is what history actually shows. Every generation is absolutely certain that the next one is doomed. And every generation has been wrong.

Boomers raised hippies. Hippies protested wars. Everyone thought all was lost. The hippies grew up, got mortgages, and started worrying about their own kids. In the 1980s, a landmark report called A Nation at Risk declared that American education had been so thoroughly eroded that the country’s future was in serious jeopardy. In the 1990s, employers complained that millennials, then teenagers, were entitled, distracted, and wholly unprepared for the workforce.

Those millennials are now in their thirties and forties, running companies, raising children, and being told that their kids are the unprepared ones.

The catastrophe is always just around the corner. It has also, somehow, never quite arrived.

That is not an argument that everything is fine and nothing needs attention. It is an argument against panic. Panic is not a strategy. It is just noise that makes it harder to think clearly about the actual problems in front of us.

And look, the concern is understandable. These students are in my classrooms every semester. Some days I worry too! But worry and panic are different things. One keeps you paying attention. The other just makes everyone feel worse without actually helping anyone.

Here is what is actually going well.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. average high school graduation rate reached 87 percent in the 2021 to 2022 school year, seven percentage points higher than a decade earlier. More young people are finishing high school than at any point in recorded American history. That is not a crisis. That is progress.

Gen Z will make up over 30 percent of the American workforce by 2030, and they are arriving with credentials. Skilled trades are facing a significant labor shortage, which means young people entering those fields are walking into genuine demand. The picture is complicated. It is not hopeless.

And here is the part that rarely makes the headlines. This generation is remarkable.

Research from Upwork found that 58 percent of Gen Z Americans have a side hustle or freelance gig, double the rate of millennials at the same age, entrepreneurial initiative that somehow never makes the alarming headlines. According to Deloitte’s 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, 75 percent of Gen Z say that an organization’s community engagement and societal impact is an important factor when considering a potential employer, pragmatic, values-driven, and intentional about the lives they are building. They are socially conscious in ways that go largely unacknowledged because social consciousness does not generate outrage clicks.

They have also grown up navigating genuine complexity: a pandemic, a fractured information landscape, economic uncertainty. Many of them have developed a resilience that does not get nearly enough credit.

Real problems exist. They deserve to be named.

None of that means everything is fine. There are real challenges worth naming honestly.

Student loan debt now totals approximately $1.84 trillion in the United States, a serious and legitimate burden for tens of millions of families. The mental health crisis among young people is real and measurable — nearly 40 percent of high school students report ongoing feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents have risen significantly over the past decade. Reading scores on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress fell to their lowest levels in decades, with the steepest declines among the lowest-performing students and those students are disproportionately from lower-income families. Income-based disparities in access to quality education remain persistent and deeply unfair. Where you are born and what your family earns still predicts far too much about the educational opportunities available to you.

Most of these challenges get airtime. News cycles, task forces, congressional hearings. One factor that rarely gets attention though is career exploration, the structured, intentional kind, still largely absent from most high school and college experiences, and least available to the students who need it most. Without it, too many young people arrive at major life decisions without the self-knowledge to make informed ones. That is part of why this work matters.

The difference between awareness and panic.

Knowing the problems exist is not the same as believing all is lost. One leads to action. The other leads to paralysis, blame, and a lot of very stressed people making fear-based decisions that serve no one well, especially not the young person sitting at the center of it all, wondering why every adult in their life seems to think their future is hopeless.

Schools are trying. Parents are trying. Kids are trying. In most cases, all three are doing so without nearly enough support, information, or grace from the rest of us. The least anyone can do is stop telling them the game is already over.

So what does action actually look like?

For parents: get curious instead of scared. Learn about the actual options available to your child, all of them, not just the ones that feel familiar. Ask questions instead of delivering conclusions. A young person who feels supported and informed is far more likely to make a good decision than one who feels panicked and pressured.

For educators: you are already doing one of the hardest and most important jobs there is. The fact that you are still showing up matters more than the headlines give you credit for.

For the young adult reading this and wondering why everyone seems to think your future is a disaster: it is not. It is complicated, and it will require work to navigate, and there will be moments that are genuinely hard. That has always been true. It was true for your parents. It was true for their parents. And somehow, here we all are. Which, given everything, is actually kind of remarkable.

The path forward is not found in the panic. It is found in the work, the quiet, intentional, one step at a time work of figuring out who you are, what you want, and how to build a life around those things instead of around someone else’s fear.

All is not lost.

It never was.

Elon Musk recently predicted that within ten to twenty years, work will be optional, like a hobby. AI and robotics will handle everything, money will become irrelevant, and if you want to work, it will be the same as growing vegetables in your backyard, harder than just going to the store, but something some people will still do because they enjoy it.

Set aside for a moment whether you find that vision thrilling or terrifying or somewhere in between. Set aside the timeline, the robots, and the universal basic income. Focus on the underlying assumption: that if we did not have to work, we would be happier.

The research would like a word about that.

Because a version of that fantasy already lives in most of us. The lottery ticket. The inheritance from a distant relative you forgot existed. The passive income stream that somehow generates itself. The retirement countdown clock. The deep, sustained daydream of a Monday morning with nowhere to be and no one’s expectations to meet.

And if you have ever sat at your desk at work wondering if this is all there is, I have been there too. And I am gently, warmly, and with a fair amount of research on my side, here to suggest that the thing you are blaming might not actually be the source of the problem.

What work is actually doing for you. Without asking permission.

Research shows that work structures time, shapes personal status and identity, provides social contact outside of family life, makes us feel part of a collective purpose, and keeps us active.

On the status and identity piece, before you skip past it, consider what happens when someone asks “so what do you do?” The answer to that question, whatever it is, is doing more psychological work than most people realize. It gives us a way to locate ourselves in the world, a sense of contribution, of role, of belonging to something beyond our own four walls. Work is one of the most common ways people meet that need. It is not the only way. But when it disappears suddenly and without replacement, people feel it.

Research on self-determination theory identifies four core psychological needs that work, at its best, satisfies: autonomy, competence, relatedness, and a sense of making a positive contribution. Meaningful work contributes to positive emotional well-being, life satisfaction, and less depression.

When those things disappear, the data gets uncomfortable. Research using the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study estimates that 9 percent of U.S. adults in the labor force experience a major depressive episode in any given year. Among retirees, that number climbs to nearly one in three.

The dream of doing nothing has a complicated relationship with actually feeling good. Even Musk acknowledged this, asking: “If the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?” He is asking the right question, even if he does not quite land on the right answer.

None of this is an argument that you should love Mondays, or that ambition is a moral virtue, or that wanting rest makes you ungrateful. It is an argument that what gets blamed for unhappiness is not always actually the source of it.

So if work provides all of this, why are so many people so miserable?

That is the right question. And the answer is almost never “work.” It is usually something more specific. The type of work. The environment. The people. The commute you stopped noticing until it started quietly costing you. The boss. The growing gap between who you are and what you are being asked to do every day.

Work is easy to identify as the villain because it is big and visible and takes up most of your waking hours. But blaming work is a little like blaming the kitchen because every meal you cook in it turns out badly. Is the kitchen really the problem? Or could it be something else?

Here is what the research says actually makes people happy at work. Some of it might surprise you.

In surveys, 86 percent of people said they valued interesting work, and 76 percent rated a sense of accomplishment as important as or more important than pay. Not a raise. Not a better title. Interesting work and a sense of accomplishment.

Research from the Harvard Study of Adult Development found that having strong relationships at work is one of the most powerful drivers of well-being, more powerful even than doing meaningful work itself. Having even one genuine friend at work makes people feel happier, more engaged, and more satisfied. Not a best friend. Not a therapist. One person who makes the work day feel survivable. That is doing an enormous amount of psychological work, and most people never think to count it.

Research has also found that having a competent boss is one of the most crucial factors in workplace happiness. Not a visionary. Not a cheerleader. Just someone who knows what they are doing and treats people well.

And here is one that might be most surprising. A study of more than 26,000 employees found that adding just 20 minutes to the daily commute has the same negative effect on job satisfaction as receiving a 19 percent pay cut. The thing you probably never even considered when you took the job.

The point is this: people are often remarkably bad at identifying what is actually making them unhappy at work. The work gets blamed when the culprit is the commute. More money seems like the answer when what is actually needed is one colleague who makes the day feel lighter. The same role gets taken somewhere else and nothing changes, and nobody can figure out why.

The mismatch might go deeper.

Sometimes the problem is not the environment at all. Sometimes the fit itself is wrong, and that is a more uncomfortable thing to sit with because it raises harder questions.

Think of it this way. If you are right-handed and someone hands you a pair of left-handed scissors, those scissors are not broken and you are not broken. The fit is just wrong. Every attempt takes twice the effort, produces half the result, and leaves you frustrated in a way that is genuinely hard to explain to someone who has never used the wrong scissors.

That is what it feels like to spend forty hours a week in a role that does not align with who you actually are. Your interests are not engaged. Your values are quietly in conflict with the work or the place you are doing it. The job is checking one box and ignoring everything else. It does not announce itself dramatically. It just slowly drains you in a way that is hard to name and easy to blame on everything else.

And here is the part worth that needs to be stated clearly, because not every situation comes with an easy exit. Sometimes you are in a job because people depend on you. Because leaving is not an option right now. Because the bills exist whether or not the work is fulfilling. Anyone who breezes past that reality with advice about following your passion has clearly never had a mortgage payment or rent due next week.

Staying somewhere that does not fit for real and legitimate reasons is not a personal failure. It is a circumstance. The goal is not to pretend everything is fine. It is to understand clearly what is and is not working, so that when circumstances do shift, your career adjustments are deliberate and strategic rather than reactive.

The fantasy, gently examined.

The lottery ticket is not really about money. It is about relief. About escaping something that is not working and imagining that its absence would fix everything. Musk’s AI utopia is a grander version of the same fantasy, a world where the thing that is draining us simply goes away.

But the research keeps pointing at the same inconvenient truth. It is rarely the work itself. It is the fit. The environment. The relationships. The commute. The mismatch between who you are and what you spend your days doing.

Those things can be examined. Sometimes they can be changed. And understanding the actually source of the problem is a considerably more productive use of your energy than buying a lottery ticket.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with how hard you’re working.

I wore cute suits. I had a good salary. I was a professional.

And still, almost every Sunday evening, something in me went quiet in a way I didn’t have words for.

That’s the thing about building a career around necessity instead of fit. It doesn’t feel like failure. It feels like fine. And fine is surprisingly easy to stay inside for a very long time.

I spent almost ten years as a claims representative at BNSF Railway. I didn’t hate it. That’s wasn’t the problem. If I had hated it, I might have left sooner. Instead, I was good enough at it. It paid well enough. It was stable enough. Every “enough” was doing quiet damage I couldn’t quite measure.

Here is where it didn’t fit. I was barely using any of my strengths. Parts of the job were interesting, but they were few and far between. My values were increasingly being pulled into conflict. And while the job was meeting my financial goals, I didn’t feel fulfilled or satisfied at the end of the day. Ever.

I kept waiting for that feeling to arrive. I assumed it was something you grew into, like learning to like black coffee or appreciating long meetings. I assumed I just needed more time, a different manager, a new project.

What I actually needed was to have asked better questions about fifteen years earlier — before the student loans, before the couch, before the job that fit the crisis instead of the person.

That’s not a regret I carry with bitterness. But I do carry it with intention.

I think about the students I work with now — the ones sitting in my Career and Life Planning class at the community college, or the people who find me through my book or my career exploration practice. Almost all of them are doing what I did. Making decisions based on what’s available, what their parents expect, what their friends are doing, what pays enough to solve the immediate problem.

Very few of them have ever been asked what they actually want. Not in a vague, inspirational-poster way. In a real, structured way: What are your strengths? What genuinely interests you? What do you value? What are your goals? And how do you build a life around those things?

That is exactly what Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration walks you through — step by step, in order, without skipping the parts that actually matter.

That gap, between the decisions people make and the information they’d need to make better ones, is the whole reason I do this work.

A good job and the right life are not automatically the same thing. Sometimes they are. But you don’t find out by accident. You find out by doing the work of knowing yourself before the crisis makes the decision for you.

If you want to do that work at your own pace, Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration will walk you through the entire process step by step. If you want a more personal starting point, an MBTI or Strong Interest Inventory assessment with a one-on-one appointment might be exactly what you need to get clarity and get moving. Either way, the time to start is not when the next crisis hits. The time to start is now. Visit vpcareerexploration.com to learn more.

I was at a Royals game recently, tailgating in the parking lot with my husband and a big group — coworkers, family, friends. At some point, not trying to eavesdrop, I overheard a young woman in the group, a daughter of one of my husband’s coworkers, telling someone she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. Maybe hair. Maybe sales.

I said nothing.

My husband later asked if I had jumped in. Nope. Not a word. And before you assume I was being shy, or modest, or that I somehow missed my moment, I want to be clear. I heard her. I had thoughts. Helping people in exactly that situation is my career. She even attends the college where I teach. She is ideal for my Career and Life Planning class.

I still said nothing.

Here is why. (Fair warning. I teach with stories. I disclose this to my students on the first day of class. Consider yourself warned.)

A few years ago I was grocery shopping and reached for something off the shelf. Before it even made it into my cart, a stranger next to me said, without being asked, “that’s not healthy.”

I stood there stunned for a moment. Is this really happening?

I want to be fair. That person was probably trying to help. Maybe they are a nutritionist. Maybe they are a doctor. Maybe their cousin ate that exact product, got violently ill, hired an attorney, and is currently leading a class action lawsuit while the FDA scrambles to issue a recall.

Maybe.

But I did not ask. And I already knew it wasn’t healthy. And I wanted it anyway.

Here is my personal policy: I do not offer unsolicited career advice. Not because I don’t have any to give. Not because I don’t care. But because advice only works when the person receiving it is ready to hear it. And the clearest signal that someone is ready? They ask.

This holds even when a good friend is venting to me about their college age kid who has no idea what they want to do with their life, and they turn to me and say “what do you think?” I won’t give an opinion. Not because I lack one. Because even though my friend is asking, they are the wrong person to be asking me. Their kid is not there. Their kid did not ask me.

And honestly, I only know the story from my friend’s perspective, which means any advice I gave would be based on incomplete information, therefore likely bad advice.

I have no interest in becoming exhibit A in a future argument between my friend and their kid about what they should or should not be doing with their life. That is not a role I signed up for. I signed up to be your friend. Which means I will absolutely sit with you, listen to your frustrations and concerns about your child, and be present for all of it. I just won’t be handing out career advice for your child over lunch.

Research on behavior change backs this up. Motivational interviewing, a well established counseling approach, is built on the principle that people change when they are intrinsically ready, not when someone else decides it is time. Unsolicited advice, even excellent advice, tends to trigger resistance rather than reflection. We dig in. We get defensive.

And yes, I still bought the product at the grocery store that day. And I bought it many times since. Almost out of spite, if I am being honest. There is actually a name for that in psychology. Reactance theory describes our tendency to push back against perceived threats to our freedom, including unsolicited opinions from strangers in the grocery store.

Eventually I stopped buying this product, when I was ready, because I decided I wanted to. Not because someone told me to. Real change does not come from a stranger in a grocery aisle offering their unsolicited opinion. It comes from within you, when you are ready.

The people who come to me for help are ready. I know because they came to me. They enrolled, they scheduled, they asked.

So if you are out there, not sure whether hair or sales or something else entirely, and you are ready to figure it out, I am here.

I will not corner you in a parking lot. I will not be that nosey stranger in the grocery store. And I promise I will be good lunch company.

But I will wait until you ask.

When you are ready, you know where to find me. Hint: it is not the grocery store. vpcareerexploration.com

Let me be clear before anyone comes for me. Passion matters. I am not here to tell you that passion is irrelevant or that you should spend forty years doing something that makes you bored or miserable.

But "follow your passion" as a career strategy? We need to talk.

It all started, at least in its modern form, with a study.

In the early 1960s, researcher Srully Blotnick followed 1,500 people over twenty years. He divided them into two groups. Group A said they would chase money first and do what they loved later. Group B said they would follow their interests and trust the money would come. Twenty years later, there were 101 millionaires in the group. One came from Group A. One hundred came from Group B.

The conclusion seemed obvious. Follow your passion and the money will follow.

The problem? Blotnick's research was later found to be unsupported by the claims he made. His Forbes column was canceled in 1987, and he became the subject of a New York State criminal investigation. More importantly, the methodology was never verified. The numbers vary depending on who is telling the story. The research has been questioned and debunked for decades. But the damage was already done. The myth had spread with undeserved credibility, and "follow your passion" became truth.

That is how these things work. Something sounds good, it gets repeated, and before long nobody remembers where it started but now it is stated as truth.

A similar phenomenon played out earlier this year. Reese Witherspoon posted an Instagram reel telling a young woman to stop chasing her dreams and chase her talents instead. It racked up 245,000 likes and set off a full news cycle. A friend reposted it because it rang true to her. And just like that, a new truth was born: dreams don't matter, talent does. It spread with the speed of social media and the credibility of a Hollywood legend.

Is it good advice? Partly. Is it the whole picture? Not even close.

Which brings me back to passion. Because whether the advice is "follow your passion," "chase your talent," or something your well-meaning relative said to you over Thanksgiving dinner, the problem is the same: single-ingredient career advice rarely works. And passion, specifically, has a lot to answer for.

Why "Follow Your Passion" Fails in Practice

Passions change. What sets you on fire at nineteen is not necessarily what fulfills you at thirty-five. I have watched students make major educational and financial commitments based on a passion that quietly faded two years later. That is not a character flaw. That is just being human. Leadership coach Amina AlTai puts it directly: passions are "by nature fickle" and building your career around them "positions you to fizzle out fast."

Turning a passion into a job can kill it. The thing you loved doing for the pure joy of it feels different when you have to do it every day, meet a deadline, answer to a difficult boss, and generate enough income to pay rent. The joy gets complicated. Sometimes it disappears entirely.

Some people have too many passions to choose from. I sit across from students regularly who love six things equally and cannot figure out which one to build a life around. "Follow your passion" is not actionable advice when you have seven of them.

And then the one I see most often: some people feel like they do not have a passion at all. They hear "follow your passion" and the message they receive is not inspiring. It is deflating. It makes them feel like everyone else got something they missed.

I want to be very direct about this. I see it in my classroom and with clients regularly. People who carry this quietly, like a secret shame they hoped nobody would ever discover, as if not having a passion is a major personal character flaw. It is not. If you do not have an obvious, singular, burning passion, you are not broken. You are not behind. According to Zippia's analysis of job satisfaction data, only 20% of U.S. employees say they are passionate about their work. That means 80% of working Americans are not. You are actually in the majority. People just do not like to admit it.

Passion Is One Ingredient. Not the Recipe.

In my work with students and clients, I talk less about passion and more about interests. Because interests are what actually sustain you over a forty year career.

Passion is intense and exciting. It can also be fleeting and hard to identify. Interests are quieter. More consistent. They are the things that pull your attention naturally, that make time disappear, that leave you feeling energized rather than drained. You know that feeling when you look up and four hours have passed and it felt like twenty minutes? That is interest at work. And the opposite, when twenty minutes feels like four hours, is what happens when your work has no connection to what genuinely engages you.

That is actually what the Strong Interest Inventory measures. Not passion. Interests. The types of work, environments, and tasks that genuinely engage you, so that the career you choose gives you more of the four-hours-that-felt-like-twenty and less of the twenty-minutes-that-felt-like-four-hours. Over a lifetime of work, that distinction matters enormously.

NYU Stern professor Suzy Welch frames a purposeful career as finding an "area of transcendence" where three things intersect: your values, your skills, and interests that can financially sustain you. Dreams tend to reflect your values and interests, but without a real skills component and economic viability, they are not enough to sustain a career.

A fulfilling career is built on understanding your strengths, including the quiet ones nobody ever named for you. Your interests, what genuinely engages you even if it does not feel dramatic enough to call a passion. Your values, what matters to you in how you spend your time and your life. Your goals, what you actually want your future to look like. And the practical realities: labor market demand, earning potential, and the cost of the education required to get there.

And about those talents Reese mentioned? I call them strengths, what are you good at. Same idea, and she is not wrong that they matter. But strengths alone, without interests, values, goals, and an honest look at the practical realities, is still just one ingredient.

Passion without those other ingredients is just enthusiasm with no map.

Some of the most fulfilled professionals I have ever worked with did not start with a passion. They started with curiosity. With talent they decided to develop, which then becomes a strength. With a value they refused to compromise on. And over time, through mastery and meaning, the passion followed the work, not the other way around.

What I have found to be true is that sometimes the passion follows the work. And sometimes what follows is something quieter — satisfaction, meaning, a sense that what you do actually fits who you are. That is more sustainable than passion.

Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration walks you through the full process: strengths, interests, values, goals, and the practical realities, so you can make a career decision that actually fits. If you want to go deeper on the interests piece, I also offer the Strong Interest Inventory with a virtual one-on-one session to walk through your results together. For more information visit vpcareerexploration.com.

I teach a College Success Strategies course. Career exploration is not part of the curriculum. So technically, what I am about to tell you is out of context. But I am a career counselor. And sometimes I just can’t help myself.

Meet Student.

Student works hard. Attends every class. Studies. Meets with a tutor. Goes to office hours. Does everything I advise a struggling student to do.

Now for Student’s story.

Student started at a four-year university as a business major, struggled, and transferred to community college with the plan to get grades up and eventually transfer back. Still pursuing business. Still on the same path. Along the way, there have been courses that needed to be retaken — including a business class, now being taken a second time. Most recently, Student reported their highest grade ever on that class.

Student is already an esthetician. So why go back to school for business? Because Student wants to run their own esthetics business someday. Which makes sense. Except Student recently met with their college counselor to plan their classes for next semester, and mentioned, almost as a footnote, that after finishing the business degree, they plan to go into nursing.

After.

I heard this and had to physically stop myself and bite my tongue. I started doing the mental math. Student is already on a six-plus year track for a business degree they are struggling to get through. Nursing requires its own entirely separate prerequisites — biology, chemistry, anatomy — none of which overlap with business. We are talking about potentially a decade of education, tens of thousands of dollars, and an enormous amount of hard work to arrive at a career they have never explored, for reasons they have never fully examined.

To be clear: this is not about intelligence. Student is smart. This is not about work ethic. They have plenty of that. This is about the fact that nobody ever helped them slow down and ask the foundational questions before they started running.

What do you actually want? Why do you want it? Does this plan make sense for who you are and where you want to go?

Here is the part of this story I love. Their college counselor said something. They flagged it. Encouraged Student to pump the brakes and reconsider before committing to the next step. The counselor said it so I didn’t have to, because that is not the role I play with this student. But I hope that one conversation changes their plan, or at least gets them to think twice.

College counselors are one of the most underused resources in career exploration. In my book Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration, I talk about why — they are free, they are accessible, and sometimes they are the person who asks the question nobody else thought to ask. Here’s something worth knowing: many community colleges allow prospective students to meet with a counselor before they ever enroll. You don’t have to wait. Go in with your ideas, your questions, your half-formed plan. That is exactly what they are there for.

Student has one in their corner. I am glad.

Their story is not unique. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 80% of college students change their major at least once and on average do so three times. Smart, hardworking people running as fast as they can, just not entirely sure where they are going yet. That is not a character flaw. That is what happens when career exploration gets skipped.

Student Stories is an ongoing series of real stories from my classroom. Students are kept anonymous. The experiences are real.

Let me tell you about two very different women who shaped my approach to education and career without either of them ever sitting me down and having a single conversation about it.

My mom and Dana Scully.

Yes. The X-Files. Stay with me.

My mom is brilliant. Genuinely, remarkably smart. She comes from an educated family. Her father was a doctor, her mother had a master’s degree and sang opera. My mom had every advantage and every reason to build an impressive career.

She chose motherhood instead. Which is beautiful. And wonderful. But did not go according to plan.

Married at 19. First child at 20. By 25 she had four kids, including me. By 32 she had seven. By 35 she was divorced, without a college degree, with minimal work experience, living in a cinderblock apartment in student family housing on a college campus while going back to school and raising my three younger siblings.

What she accomplished in those circumstances was actually remarkable. I can see that clearly now.

But at pre-teen and teenager, watching all of this unfold? I was just absorbing it. Filing it away. Letting it shape me in ways I would not have been able to articulate for another twenty years.

Meanwhile, my dad, who had five daughters and was absolutely terrified we would repeat our mother’s story, developed his own approach to career guidance. His version sounded something like:

“If you choose to get married, that is an adult decision and I will respect it. But I will not give you another cent for anything, including school, because adults support themselves.”

Not exactly a Ted Talk on career exploration. But it came from love, and fear. He did not want us to struggle the way our mom did.

But here is what was actually happening inside my head during my most formative years in high school, completely unexamined and unspoken:

My mom. Struggling secretary. Frumpy dresses. Overwhelmed. Dana Scully. FBI agent. Doctor. Brilliant. Independent. Incredible suits.

Who did I want to be?

I would have never said out loud that my career decisions were shaped by not wanting to become my mom. I don’t even think I thought anything bad about her. But I absolutely would have acknowledged a desire to be like Dana Scully. Those silent, screaming influences were there. Unconscious. Powerful. Real. I was building an identity in direct reaction to what I was watching, in real life and on TV, without even knowing I was doing it.

Research backs this up. A study of Generation Z students found that 60 percent said parental pressure or wishes were the major influence on their career choices. Not their own interests. Not their own values. Their parents.

Sixty percent.

It does not always look like mine. But it is almost always present.

There is the student whose parents immigrated to this country with nothing, sacrificed everything, and now the only acceptable careers are doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Not because the parents are controlling. Because in their experience, those are the careers that meant survival and security. That love is real. That pressure is crushing.

There is the student whose parents never went to college and genuinely do not understand why their kid wants to. “I make good money. You don’t need a degree.” Sometimes that is wisdom. Sometimes it is fear. Sometimes it is both.

There is the student whose parents are wildly successful, CEO, surgeon, partner at a firm, and the path has basically been paved and assumed since birth. Nobody said the student had to follow it. It is just understood. And the student has no idea what they actually want because they have never been asked.

There is the student who says “my parents don’t care what I do as long as I am happy,” which sounds like freedom but can sometimes feel like standing in the middle of a field with no map and no compass and being told to pick a direction. Liberating and terrifying in equal measure.

And then there is the student who has a parent living vicariously through them. The dad who wanted to play pro ball. The mom who always dreamed of being a [____________]. The parent who frames every career conversation through the lens of their own unfulfilled dreams.

None of these parents are villains. Most of them are doing exactly what my dad did, loving their kids the best way they know how, filtered through their own experiences, their own fears, and their own unfinished or unfulfilled stories.

But here is what I want every student and every parent to sit with for a moment.

Your parents’ story is not your story.

Their fears should not be your restraints. Their dreams are not your destiny. Their definition of success is not the only one that counts.

In my book Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration, I have an entire chapter dedicated to external influences and biases, the forces that shape our thinking about education and careers, often before we even realize it. Parents are one of the most powerful ones. Unlike peer influence, which can be more subtle, parental influence is often direct, emotional, and deeply personal.

Which means it deserves direct, honest examination.

Not to assign blame. Not to dismiss the love behind it.

But to separate what is yours from what is theirs. So you can make a decision about your future that actually belongs to you.

Ask yourself, honestly, whose voice is in your head when you think about your career? Whose approval are you seeking? Whose life are you trying to avoid?

The answers might surprise you.

They surprised me.

If you are ready to start that examination, Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration walks you through understanding yourself and making a career decision that actually fits you. Visit vpcareerexploration.com to learn more.

I was not the kid my high school was designed for. I just didn’t know that then.

My high school sent kids to Stanford and the Ivies. Nearly twenty National Merit finalists in my graduating class. My peers were destined for success. I was focused on something simpler: not being found out for the imposter I knew I was.

I perceived myself as less ambitious. I didn’t understand why things that seemed easy for everyone else were so hard for me. I wouldn’t find out until junior year that I was dyslexic. Until then I had a simpler explanation: I just wasn’t as smart.

But, I had softball. I clung to it because it was the one place where I knew, without question, that I was good at something. Not the best. Just good. And when you spend your school days quietly convinced you’re the dumb one while everyone around you is thriving, a place where you feel capable matters enormously.

My world was small. And without fully realizing it, the education and career possibilities I imagined for myself were shaped entirely by the world I was standing in.

Researchers call this the social norm effect. We look to the people around us to figure out what is appropriate, possible, and worth pursuing, often without realizing we are doing it at all. Studies on adolescent career development consistently show that peers socialize one another in terms of academic beliefs, behaviors, and career aspirations. Peer influence can be both positive and negative, either broadening career perspectives or reinforcing the paths that already feel normal. We think we are making independent decisions. We are mostly making social ones.

I went to Occidental College, a small liberal arts school in Los Angeles. A good school. Some would say a great school. But I didn’t see it that way, because it wasn’t Stanford or an Ivy. It was, however, a school that fit neatly inside the expectations of what someone from my world was supposed to do after high school.

That is peer influence. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly narrows the frame of what feels possible or acceptable.

And it works in both directions.

Peers can open doors you never knew existed. Research shows that first-generation college students who knew peers or extended family members who had attended college had better access to a knowledgeable support system. College became something they could see, and therefore something they could imagine for themselves. A kid from a family of accountants whose classmate goes to trade school suddenly realizes that was an option too. Exposure is everything.

But peers can also close doors, making certain choices feel normal and others feel strange, risky, or simply invisible. In communities where a four-year university is the only path anyone talks about, trade school becomes unthinkable. In communities where nobody goes to college, university feels like someone else’s world. Research confirms that external influences, parents, peers, and social context, shape career interests and aspirations from childhood through adulthood, often in ways people never stop to examine.

In Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration, I dedicate an entire chapter to external influences, the forces outside of you that shape your career thinking before you ever sit down to make a conscious decision. Peer influence is one of the most powerful and least examined of those forces.

The question is not whether your peers have influenced your career thinking.

They have.

The question is whether you have ever stopped to examine how.

If you are ready to start that examination, Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration walks you through understanding yourself and making a career decision that actually fits you. Visit vpcareerexploration.com to learn more.

If you broke your arm, you would go to a doctor. You would not ask your mom to guess what is wrong based on how it looks. You would not crowd source a diagnosis from Facebook. You would not tough it out and hope for the best.

And yet when it comes to one of the most important decisions of a person’s life, what to do with their career, we routinely expect people to figure it out alone, with whatever advice happens to be nearby.

Your uncle who has been in sales for thirty years. Your high school counselor who sees four hundred students and has twenty minutes per kid. The well-meaning parent who genuinely believes their child should do what made them happy.

All of that advice comes from a place of love. Almost none of it is actually helpful.

Here is why. Career guidance, real career guidance, is not about telling someone what to do. It is about giving them the tools, the framework, and the space to figure out what is right for them. It is about asking questions that most people have never been asked. It is about surfacing things that are already there but have never been examined.

That is not something love can do on its own. Love is not a framework. Caring about someone is not the same as being equipped to guide them.

And the research is clear on what happens when people do get proper guidance. Studies across multiple research settings show that the average career counseling client has an outcome better than 80 percent of people who received no guidance at all. Not a little better. Better than 80 percent!

That is what structured, professional career guidance actually does.

This is why I became a Licensed Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor. This is why I spent years developing a process that works. This is why I wrote Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration, because the guidance people need is specific, structured, and deeply personal. And it should not be a luxury available only to people who happen to know the right person or can afford an expensive consultant.

Career guidance should be accessible. It should be grounded in real tools and real science. And it should put the answer in the hands of the person whose life it actually belongs to.

Not their parents. Not their friends. Not their Facebook feed.

Them.

If you are ready to start that examination, Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration walks you through understanding yourself and making a career decision that actually fits you. Visit vpcareerexploration.com to learn more.

The Department of Education made news this week by launching an “earnings indicator” that flags colleges whose graduates earn less, on average, than people who only finished high school. The Trump administration is now proposing to go further, cutting federal student loan access to programs that can’t demonstrate a positive return on investment for their graduates. (Department of Education press release)

People will have opinions on this. On both sides. They always do!

But here’s what I want to talk about: the fact that most students have never thought about ROI before choosing a degree, and by the time the government gets involved, it’s already too late.

In addition to teaching at a community college, I work with private clients who are trying to figure out what comes next with their career. Some arrive with no idea. “Marcus” arrived with a plan.

Marcus had a college degree in communications. The degree had cost him time and money and had shaped nothing about the path he ended up on.

His favorite job he’d ever had was at Chick-fil-A. Not just because of their amazing chicken, but because he loved training people, developing them, watching them grow. It was the kind of work that left him satisfied at the end of the day.

But Marcus was older now. Married. Kids. He and his wife had made a decision together — she would stay home with the children. That meant he needed an income that could actually accomplish that.

He’d landed in pool maintenance and repair. He was excellent at it and promoted quickly. Technically skilled, detail-oriented, genuinely good with his hands. While he liked the work, he’d hit an income ceiling and his salary was barely enough.

So he came to me thinking about nursing school.

It made sense on the surface. He missed working with people. His Strong Interest Inventory confirmed real interest in the medical field. He was smart enough. He was motivated. Nursing would get him back to something relational and give his family the income they needed.

We talked through it together. The prerequisites before he could even start. Two years of school: would he work during that time to support his family, or take out loans? What the daily life of a nurse actually looks like — 12-hour shifts, overtime, nights and weekends. And the part that doesn’t get advertised: many nurses go back for a BSN after that, another two years on top of that, most nurses working the whole way through, before the salary he had in mind actually arrives. Nobody puts that part in the brochure.

He was glad to work through it. He hadn’t really done that yet. His thinking had stopped at “nursing pays well and it’s a stable field,” which is true. It’s also true of elevator repair technicians and railroad conductors, and nobody was suggesting those. (Look up those salaries. It might surprise you!)

But true isn’t the same as right for him — not right now, not with this family and this timeline.

Once he saw the full picture, the ROI problem was hard to ignore.

He could have become a nurse. He was thinking smart by considering it. But the timeline, the lost income, the loans, the years before that salary actually arrived — none of it fit the life he was trying to build right now.

What we were able to find instead were paths that tied together everything he already had: his talent for training and managing people, his skills for fixing and troubleshooting, and his need for strong earning potential in fields with real demand. He had the transferable skills to make a shift into something that fit him better and paid his family better, without gutting their finances for two or three years to get there.

He didn’t need to become a nurse. He needed a clearer picture of what he already had and what it was actually worth.

This is the ROI conversation that should happen before anyone enrolls in anything. Not after.

Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration — which, full disclosure, was written by yours truly — dedicates an entire section to career exploration, including a framework for calculating the real return on an educational investment. The companion workbook walks you through it too. And separately, in the Career and Life Planning course I teach, I have students apply this same framework to careers they’re actually considering for their own futures, because the habit of asking these questions before committing is something I want them to carry for life.

Here’s part of what that framework looks like.

Total cost, not just tuition. The average in-state four-year degree now costs around $30,000 per year in total cost of attendance: tuition, fees, room, board, and supplies. That’s roughly $120,000 for a bachelor’s degree before a single dollar of interest is added for student loans. (College Board, Trends in College Pricing 2024) Private schools run closer to $250,000 for four years. A trade program, by comparison, typically runs $5,000 to $33,000 total, and some apprenticeship programs are fully paid, meaning you earn while you learn. And here’s the number that tends to stop people: the average borrower takes 20 years to repay their student loan debt. Not 10. Twenty! (Hello, interest and student loan crisis!) (Education Data Initiative) Include every real cost in your calculation, not just the tuition line.

Realistic entry-level salary, not the ceiling. When people research income for a career, they tend to look at the median or the high end. That’s not where you start. O*NET, the free career database from the U.S. Department of Labor, lists wages at the “Annual Low (10th percentile)” for every occupation. That’s your realistic year-one number. Know what the first few years actually look like before you commit.

Time to income. How long before you’re earning in the new field? A trade program may have you working in 6 to 12 months. A nursing program has prerequisites first, then two years of school, then often more. Every month in school is a month you’re not earning, and that gap has a real cost.

What you’re giving up while you wait. This is the factor people most often skip, and it’s the one that made Marcus’s situation so clear. If you’re currently working, what does it cost your household to go back to school? Lost wages, increased debt, deferred savings, reduced retirement contributions — all of it counts. For Marcus, this wasn’t abstract. It was his wife’s ability to be home with their children. A path that required years of financial strain was working directly against the goal that motivated the change in the first place.

The trades argument, and why it’s getting real traction. There’s a reason you’re seeing so much conversation right now about skilled trades as a career path. The ROI math, when you run it honestly, is compelling. Trade programs typically cost a fraction of a four-year degree and take months, not years. Graduates enter the workforce earning immediately, no prerequisites, no waiting. And 47% of skilled trades workers now earn more than the median college graduate, a number that becomes even more striking when you factor in that trades graduates start without the debt load that college graduates spend years repaying. This isn’t an argument against college. It’s an argument for doing the math before you decide which path fits your situation. (The Birmingham Group, 2025)

Labor market demand where you actually live. A credential that leads to strong employment in one city may lead to very few openings in another. Search current job postings in your geographic area. How many are available? What do they actually require? What are they paying? O*NET also provides state and local wage data, which can look very different from the national figures.

Growth potential and the income ceiling. Marcus wasn’t just asking what a job pays at entry. He’d already experienced an income ceiling in pool work. Look at how a salary grows over time, what advancement looks like, and whether the field has room to move. Some careers have steep growth curves. Others plateau quickly.

Personal fit with the season of life you’re actually in. This one isn’t a number, but it belongs in every ROI conversation. Your personal circumstances — family, finances, geography, time — aren’t background details. They’re part of the calculation. A path that’s theoretically smart may not be right for where you actually are right now.

What I find most striking about the news this week is not the policy itself. It’s the fact that the colleges being flagged as “low-earning” are already receiving approximately $2 billion a year in federal student aid. That means students have been borrowing federal money to attend programs that may never deliver a return on their investment — wasting theses students money and time in the process. They deserved better information before they enrolled.

Here’s what I want you to hear. Before you commit to any school or program, ROI research is not optional. Ask the real questions. What does this cost in total? What does it lead to in year one? Is there demand for this here? And is the investment worth it?

Let’s get some perspective. Housing is the single largest expense in most household budgets, and buying a home is the biggest financial decision most people will ever make. For younger generations, it’s also becoming increasingly out of reach, with the homeownership rate for adults under 35 having dropped to its lowest level since 2019, with affordability cited as the primary barrier. (NAHB, 2025) When you frame college costs that way, the numbers get real fast. Four years of in-state college costs around $120,000. (College Board) The median down payment for a first-time home buyer currently runs around $40,000 to $42,000. (National Association of Realtors, 2025) That means a degree that doesn’t lead to meaningful employment isn’t just an education cost. It’s a down payment on a home. When students and families understand the stakes in those terms, the conversation gets more serious fast.

The money going into an unused or underperforming degree has to come from somewhere. Make sure you know what you’re trading for it.

If you’re already in school and realizing the numbers don’t add up, it is not too late to reassess. Changing direction mid-stream is painful. It is far less painful than finishing a degree that leaves you worse off than when you started.

And if you’re choosing a school, it’s worth paying attention to how seriously it takes career exploration. More colleges are building structured career exploration into the curriculum, requiring students to engage with the process before declaring a major, particularly in fields like psychology and health sciences. Research consistently shows that students who engage in career exploration early declare majors with more confidence, switch less often, and progress more efficiently. (College Possible, 2026) That’s not a coincidence. It’s what happens when the right questions get asked before the commitment is made, not after.

Whether your school requires it or not, don’t wait to be asked. Every college has a career development office (it goes by different names: Career Services, Career Center, Career Development, Professional Development — they’re all the same idea) and it’s free to enrolled students. Make an appointment before you declare. Bring your questions. That office exists for exactly this reason, and research shows only one in five students actually uses it. (Strada Education Network, 2024) (Can you hear my heart breaking from my blood pressure rising?) Don’t be in the majority on that one.

If you’re an adult considering going back to school for a career change, please do the ROI work first. Graduate school could be the right answer. Please undersand it’s also one of the most expensive educational decisions a person can make. Know why you’re going. Know what it leads to. Know what it costs, in money, in time, and in what your family absorbs while you get there.

The good news: you don’t need a professional to start this process. Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration and the companion workbook are designed to walk you through it. A pen and paper works too. So does a conversation with an AI tool. I don’t care how you do the work, just don’t skip it! Please.

The government grading colleges on ROI is a conversation worth having. But the more important conversation is the one you have with yourself, or with your student, before the enrollment paperwork is ever signed.

Career exploration is personal. How much will these ratings really influence your decisions? Pay attention to them — and to everything else discussed here — because the government doesn’t have a program big enough to figure all that out for you.

If you want help working through your career options, MBTI and/or SII assessments with virtual meetings are available at vpcareerexploration.com.

A psychology professor once told my class something I have never forgotten.

“Ask anyone with a PhD in psychology what their dissertation was on,” he said, “and you will know what was wrong with their childhood.”

The class laughed. I laughed. And then I spent the next twenty years slowly realizing he was talking about me.

I don’t have a PhD. I have a master’s degree in Vocational Rehabilitation. But my professional life — what I teach, what I counsel, the book I wrote, the business I built — is one long attempt to give other people something I never had.

A roadmap.

Here is what nobody tells you about career decisions.

Most people don’t think about them until something goes wrong. They’re miserable at work. They got laid off. They’re halfway through a degree they hate. They’re forty and wondering how they got there.

But by the time crisis hits, real career exploration becomes nearly impossible. When you’re in survival mode — when you need a paycheck, when the rent is due, when the couch you’re sleeping on belongs to someone else — you don’t have the luxury of asking what fits your strengths or aligns with your values. You take what’s available. And then you spend the next decade being quietly good at something that is slowly making you miserable.

We tell people to eat well before they get diabetes. We tell them to exercise before the heart attack. We tell them to see the dentist before the root canal.

But career exploration? We treat it like a fire extinguisher. Only useful when something is already on fire.

The result is staggering. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, more than 40 percent of recent college graduates are working in jobs that don’t require the degree they just paid for. Billions of dollars in student loan debt attached to degrees that don’t lead anywhere meaningful. Adults years into careers that don’t fit them, with no idea how to change course. Teenagers making six-figure financial decisions based on what their best friend is doing or what they Googled at midnight before an application was due.

This is not a personal failure. It is a gap in the system.

My story is not unique. That’s exactly the problem.

I went to one of the top public high schools in California. My graduating class had nearly 20 National Merit finalists. Going to Stanford or an Ivy League school wasn’t remarkable — it was the norm. I knew no different.

I was also dyslexic, though nobody figured that out until my junior year of high school. By then I had spent years quietly convinced I was just not as smart as everyone around me. That is what it feels like when you are struggling and no one has an explanation for why.

When it came time to choose a college, I had exactly two criteria. I had to play softball. Prestige was a bonus. But mostly, softball.

That was my entire decision-making process. No thought about whether I was academically prepared. No thought about majors or careers or what I actually wanted from the experience. Softball was the one place where I knew I was good at something. It was what fed my starving self-esteem.

In retrospect, community college was exactly where I should have gone. I could have gotten my academic footing, figured out what I actually wanted to study, saved significant money, and still played softball. But that thought never had a chance to form, because my world made it socially unthinkable before I ever thought it.

So I chose Occidental College. Struggled through. Graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Science with an emphasis in Psychology.

Go ahead. Google “jobs for Cognitive Science majors.” I’ll wait.

crickets

Here’s where it gets relevant to you.

With tens of thousands of dollars in student loans that need to be paid, I needed a job. Any job. A connection through a friend of a friend got me an interview at BNSF Railway. The salary was also enough to get off my sister’s couch! So I became a Claims Representative.

And I stayed for almost ten years.

I was good enough at it. Not great, but good. It met my salary needs. It met my security needs.

But here is what it did not meet: my values, my strengths, my interests, or the future I actually wanted.

Unfulfilled is the right word. That quiet, nagging kind of unfulfilled that doesn’t announce itself dramatically — it just gets louder and harder to ignore until you can’t sleep through it anymore.

At no point did anyone ever ask me the right questions.

Not in high school. Not at Occidental. Not from a single professor or advisor.

What are you good at? What genuinely interests you? What do you value? What do you want your life to actually look like?

Nobody walked me through a process for figuring out who I was before deciding what to become. Nobody helped me connect my strengths, my interests, my values, and my goals to a path that actually fit. Nobody talked to me about the financial realities of different educational investments. Nobody helped me see that the peer culture I was swimming in was quietly shaping every decision I made.

I made every major educational and career decision of my early life based on fear, peer pressure, external expectations, sheer necessity, and softball.

And I am not unique. Not even close.

Career exploration shouldn’t wait for a crisis.

It should happen long before one — when you actually have the time, the space, and the freedom to choose well.

That’s why I became a Licensed Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor. That’s why I teach career exploration at a community college. And it’s why I wrote Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration — a book designed to walk anyone through a structured process for figuring out who they are before deciding what to become. Not what pays well, not what their parents want, not what their best friend is doing. Who they actually are — their strengths, their values, their interests, their goals — and how to use that self-knowledge to make a decision that actually fits.

I didn’t write a dissertation. I wrote a book instead. But the subject matter is still the thing I most needed and never had.

This is the first in an ongoing series on career exploration, work, and happiness. If any of it sounds familiar, stick around.

For more information, visit vpcareerexploration.com