Our jobs aren’t a horse race, so stop trying to pick a winner

In the movie The Sting, Paul Newman and Robert Redford hit on the foolproof money making exercise of placing bets on horse races after they had run. Just imagine the possibilities! You are a winner. Satisfaction guaranteed. Every single time.

If you can pull off that sting you have a perfectly predictable money-making enterprise; your winnings equals your stake multiplied by the odds. All the other factors that matter in horse races such as the condition of the track, the form of the horses and jockeys, the weather etc are completely irrelevant.

If we knew the results ahead of time, it’d be easy to pick the perfect career. But backing a winner with no experience is almost impossible.Credit: Jenny Evans

Which brings me to making career decisions. The desire to “pick a winner” among the competing field of occupations is understandable. You probably want to pick an occupation that is going to give you job satisfaction.

In no small part, career counselling assists in this process. However, because our career race has not run, we do not have the luxury of picking a guaranteed winner. And this is where things can become problematic.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote here that career counsellors should resist falling into the trap of predicting the future for their clients. Too frequently the pressure to provide a clear recommendation of a handful of occupations that are likely to be a good match for a client involves administering a test of occupational interests.

Most of us have probably encountered one of these at school or in the workplace. They typically ask us to rate our interest in activities like repairing mechanical things, using microscopes, painting pictures, helping the elderly, selling products and services, or organising accounts.

We cannot cheat and find out in advance the best horses to back. But what we can do is prepare better jockeys to run their own best race.

The answers to these questions commonly create an interest code or profile that is matched to corresponding occupations. The claim is that pursuing one of these matching occupations is more likely to lead to job satisfaction. The problem is that the evidence for this claim is exceedingly weak.

A 2020 study that examined 105 studies involving almost 40 thousand people, concluded that interest inventory results correlated weakly with job satisfaction. So weakly that if you were totally (100 per cent) uncertain which job would be satisfying, the results of these tests would reduce your uncertainty by a tiny 3.6 per cent.

In other words pursuing a career based on measured vocational interests contributes only a tiny fraction towards job satisfaction in among a range of possibly far more important factors that could impact your job satisfaction, including pay, flexible working conditions, colleagues, ease of commute, office surroundings, the boss, etc.

The issue is not whether these tests predict job satisfaction – study after study suggests that they are a fragile predictor – but rather, given the limited time and resources lamentably available for career counselling, why is so much of that time and money spent using them?

Probably because people like the illusion of certainty and these instruments fulfil that by providing a list of occupations to explore. It is concrete advice.

Further muddying the waters, is the inconvenient truth that one of the key assumptions of these tests, that birds of a feather flock together, is not supported by large-scale independent studies.

A 2018 study looked at the measured interests of people in 219 different jobs. They calculated the proportion of people in each job that shared the same primary measured interest according to the tests.

Even for the top 15 that had the biggest proportion of people sharing the same measured interests 28 per cent had different interests. For the lowest 15 occupations, about 75 per cent of people had primary interests in areas other than the one the tests suggest they should have.

In other words, people with all kinds of different interests end up working together in the same occupations. There are more important things to consider when making career decisions than relying on measures of interests to provide an even remotely accurate picture of what jobs will provide satisfaction.

Coaching and equipping people with the confidence and skills to explore occupational opportunities and to make decisions for themselves continually throughout their careers is a more productive way forward.

Life is not a horse race, and we cannot cheat and find out in advance the best horses to back. But what we can do is prepare better jockeys to run their own best race.

Dr Jim Bright, FAPS, is a director at IWCA and is Director of Evidence & Impact at edtech start up BECOME Education. Email to [e-mail]. Follow him on X/Twitter @DrJimBright

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