hat’s worth more to you: a huge signing bonus with a West Coast firm or being close to your family in New Jersey? Is taking a job near your high school sweetheart worth a lower salary? ¶ It’s nearing the time of year when college seniors are weighing these types of questions, and the decisions that are made are as much a product of what’s going on between your ears as with what’s hanging in the balance. How you use your head—the process you follow to actually make a decision—is often overlooked in the rush to make up your mind before it’s too late.
Even before the “what were they thinking?” investment choices that led to the global economic downturn in 2008, there was an impetus toward looking at how decisions are made in the business world—and how to make better ones. Applying some of the models from the field of decision science, which combines elements of statistics, psychology, and economics, can shine a light on your own career decision-making process, and hopefully help you improve your approach.
CAREER MATTERS
The decisions we make have a profound impact on our lives. As Ralph L. Keeney, co-author of Smart Choices and research professor of decision sciences at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, says, making decisions is “the only way, as an individual, that you can have any purposeful influence on your life.” And few decisions are tougher to make than those that pertain to your career. Why? Well, the career decisions you make will have an impact on your family, your love life, the clothes you wear, and the place you call home, and vice versa. Yet we put little effort into honing the process. In his book, Keeney puts forth a systematic approach to arriving at good decisions. While analysts in other fields take a normative or descriptive approach, decision analysts such as Keeney promote a prescriptive one. Rather than cataloging how people actually make decisions—an area of focus for social psychology and behavioral economics—prescriptive analysis posits how both individuals and organizations should make decisions. This comes down to minimizing poor alternatives and maximizing good alternatives. From the prescriptive analysis point of view, decision making is the same for individuals as it is for organizations—and many big companies have a department devoted to decision analysis and risk management, assessing the possible outcomes of all their big decisions. Individuals, though, have their own insights to guide—we call it common sense. “People have been making decisions for thousands of years, and they were as good at making decisions thousands of years ago as they are today,” says Keeney. Common sense, then, is the key to making a rational decision. And a rational decision is one that Keeney defines as consistent with your values based on the information available. “The reason to make a decision is to achieve something. It’s not just for the existence of a job. You could go down to McDonald’s and get a job.”
BREAK IT DOWN
In Smart Choices, Keeney outlines the PrOACT model of decision making: identifying the problem, specifying fundamental objectives, creating a range of alternatives, understanding the consequences of each one, and looking at the tradeoffs between the alternatives. This approach to decision making can be applied when seeking a job to more clearly assess the situation and get where you want to go. The first step of identifying the real problem in the decision-making process can often elude job seekers. “I think a lot of them frame this as a search process, not a decision process,” says Keeney. “They let other people control the alternatives they consider. They don’t back away and say, ‘What job would I really like?’” Rather than asking “Should I take this position?” job seekers should frame the “decision problem” differently: “Where will my work be valued?” or “Where can I best put my skills to use?” Most students have no problem grasping their objectives: pay, quality of life, proximity to family and friends. And some short-term objectives might take a back seat to more longterm considerations: the ability to make a contribution in your work, to keep learning, to have good colleagues, and overall job satisfaction. After clearly identifying your objectives, the path is clear to explore different alternatives. For an IT engineering major, this might include working for an established firm (Infosys or Cisco, for example), a small business, a brand