There's an Easier Way to Change Careers

news a lot um. It's sort of a political football, but we know that a big factor in people losing jobs is automation. Robots can do a lot of things that they couldn't do before. And that's not just factory work. That's jobs even like yours and my Inbecca. Yes, they're are robots that can write news stories. And we even did a show on this back in December while you're out on leave and kind of talked about the state of automation now because as you said, there was a

lot of scary talk about it. And I think there are two interesting statistics. So that one, there's this widely cited paper that says almost half of jobs can be automatable, and there's some debate if that's like parts of jobs or if that's actual jobs. But there are jobs that you wouldn't expect being automated away now. It's not just manufacturing. It's things like paralegals or even financial analysts and yes,

even journalists. Um. And then another part of the episode, we talked about the jobs that are the most popular right now are the fastest scrowing jobs are jobs that are the least automatable. So it's things that have a lot of social skills and things that robots aren't very good at right now. Yes, so for those people who have had long careers doing something that now a robot can do, like certain types of manufacturing, say, I think a lot of people talk about job retraining as this

like catch all solution. Basically just send all those you know, coal miners or steel workers to coding boot camp and they'll figure it out. And I feel like that's an oversimplified solution. Yeah, I think it's one if you're in the middle of your career getting your head around this idea of learning a whole new skill for maybe not

that many more years of your working life. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, And if you have to change careers, that often goes along with doing retraining like what we just talked about, and probably taking a pay cut and just basically like taking a few steps back down the career ladder to

get started again. So I think that there's another way of looking at it, which is not what other job or what other field could I enter that is kind of like the one I'm in now, But what other job could I do, even if it's nothing like the one I have now that requires the same skills I'm using for my current job, or the skills that I'm good at. And so the New York Times just did

a deep dive into this. They built this really cool graphic where they took every skill that's required for every job according to the Department of Labor and mapped it on the scatter plot so that you can actually see what skills go to what jobs and see how close your job might be to another job that you don't even expect. So, like, my job editor is pretty close to elementary school teacher in terms of how the skills for that job line up. How do you feel about

that career change? I would love to be an elementary teacher. I mean you get summers off and kids are cute. Yeah, definitely you should go to the job and think about the times you won't be working. I think it would be fun to be aroun kids all day. Would probably be really stressful, but so as being an editor. Yeah, you're basically around children all day. They also excellent writers, yea. They also used the same data to build a fun little tool that tells you what your opposite job is. Yeah.

I saw this going around on Twitter, and the popular one was your opposite job model. Model is the opposite of editor. But which I don't I disagree? Okay, I think it's not mutually exclusive. I bet there are some editors who are models. I'd be surprised. But it's not to say that models don't have skills that couldn't necessarily transfer to other jobs. They might just not be using them and modeling. Or you're an editor, it doesn't mean you can't be a model. It's not like the skills

to be an editor don't exclude you from modeling. Right. That's an important thing to think about when you're looking at charts like this, like it's going to tell you what other jobs have skills where they are like the skills you're currently using in your job. But that doesn't mean that you don't have other skills you're not using in your job, or you couldn't be good at other things that you're just like not doing every day right now,

that's right, I'm multitalented. Yeah, you could. You could probably be anything if you put your mind to Secca. That's right. That's what they told us millennials, and we're growing up. You can do anything you want. Well, to get a little bit more into what you actually can and should do if you want to change your career, I talked to the co author of that article, Claire Kane. Miller is a reporter for The Upshot at the New York Times,

where she covers gender and work. Thanks for joining us, Claire, it's great to be here. So you recently wrote a piece looking at the skills that you need for different jobs, and you wrote that many of the skills needed to do fading jobs are applicable to growing jobs. Can you

sort of explain what you mean by that? Sure, So there's this notion that if you lose your job, particularly in certain industries like those that require a lot of manual labor, but really across industries that it can be really really hard to find a new one, especially if the reason you lost your job is because that occupation is just shrinking because machines are doing more of the work there, UM, and they're just aren't as many jobs available, and so there's a lot of people who are just

stuck and they're unemployed, and they feel like there's nowhere they can turn. And there's been a lot of talk about this. UM. The Trump administration has been talking about it a lot lately, and they've been calling it the skills gap and saying that they hear from c e o s that they have a ton of jobs available and they're empty, and the problem is that nobody, um, none of the employees who are looking for jobs have

the right skills, the skills that the CEOs need. And we we took another look at it, and we found that sure, that's the case some of the time, UM, but it's also true that a lot of unemployed people do have a lot of skills that are applicable to other careers. But for a ton of different reasons, UM, related to the way that our labor force is set up.

It's very very hard for them to switch careers, to even know that their skills are applicable to other jobs, and for hiring managers or CEOs um to be able to see their potential. Yeah, you created this really cool tool that lets you look at the skills that you have for your current job and what other jobs might be similar are different. Um, And before we get into that, just tell me a little bit about the research that you did and where you got the data, what you

were kind of looking to find. So the Labor Department keeps this database called oh net and it breaks every single job that you can imagine down into the exact skills that are needed to do that job. And UM, so it is stuff like, um, I'm looking, for example

right now, at museum curator. So a museum curator, you know, needs skills like history and knowledge of history and needs to manage material resources, but also needs to be good at communicating with other people and scheduling work and activities. So it's like a whole host of of different skills and own it um breaks jobs down into those skills. And so we looked at that to try to answer the question is there really more skill overlap between jobs

than we realize and what did you find. We found that there absolutely is there is a certain segment of jobs, and the are the jobs that are either very physical and very routine, like working in a warehouse or working in a factory. Those kind of jobs have been automated and there is not, in a lot of cases a lot of similarity UM to other jobs that are available right now. That is sort of the biggest gap in

the labor market. So I'm not trying to say that there's not a group of people who really are suffering and whose occupations have gone away and they don't necessarily have a lot of skills that are easily applicable. But even for them, and especially for other UM kinds of workers, there really is a lot more overlap. For example, our chart found that UM lawyers and clergy members do a lot of the same things. Kindergarten teachers, elementary school teachers,

and editors do a lot of the same things. UM cooks and restaurants, and UM cashiers or ushers do a lot of the same things. So UM, there is you know, there is more overlap than people realize, and the problem comes down to how people actually search for jobs and how people hire for jobs. Yeah, how do you sort of find out what skills you have? Like I think most people have a general idea, but how do you start to map yourself to these skills that the Labor

Department keeps track of. So oh net made by the Labor Department is supposed to be used by you know, not just data journalists but also uh, you know, average people who are looking up to find information about their career paths. So you can go there, but it's not the easiest thing to use, and frankly, the United States doesn't have a ton of great resources for job seekers. There are some new nonprofits that are working on this.

One is called Opportunity at Work and another is called Skillful And what they're doing is basically trying to take people and say, here are your skills. Here are the skills that you have learned to do. And maybe you learn to do that in college, maybe you learn to do that as a volunteer. Maybe you worked in the mail room, but you worked they're long enough at the company that you learned and had to do other skills

that might not show up on your resume. When someone just sees that you worked in the mail room, you know you learned. You could have learned these in a lot of different places, but here are your skills and will help coach you um to find a new job. Now. Of course, that kind of personal coaching that these nonprofits offer is great, and it's not necessarily accessible for everyone. And so another fix that people say needs to happen is for employers to think really hard about how they hire. Now.

A lot of hiring has to do with credentials on a resume. As you know, a lot of resumes are just scanned now by software to weed out the ones that are not applicable, and so things people are looking for are a college degree. Definitely need a four year degree. Sometimes even where did you go to college? If it's not one of these twenty five schools, We're not even going to look at that resume those kind of things. And and the argument is, these are things from your

past that you can't change. If you didn't go to college, you know, and you are forty years old with a mortgage and two kids, you might not be able to afford to go to college now, but you might have built up skills that would make you UM talented to do a certain job even if you didn't have that degree. So the idea is if hiring managers could change the way that they look at people and look at resumes

um to test for skills as opposed to credentials. Of course, that that's a big problem to solving a big change in the way a lot of people hire. Yeah, it seems to me that even if you do have a college degree, you can find another field that you might

have really good skills for. But getting an employer, getting a hiring manager to take a risk on you, you know, hiring somebody who does a completely different type of job, that seems like a whole other can of worms, Like, is there any is there any way people can help sort of sell themselves to employers once they find out like I'd be really good at being a clergy you know, I'm a lawyer and I'd be really good at being a clergyman or whatever the example was you gave, Right,

It's it's coming on employees obviously to try to sell themselves to think, you know, just to think outside the box in the first place about what other jobs that they might be um eligible for, qualified for, and then to convince employers. But I think the burden is often really unemployers. So one thing that employers can do is skills based interviews where instead of you know, screening resumes for credentials, they're actually asking people to come in and

do part of the job. For an editor, it might be you know, doing an editing a story. Um that that is an actual part of the job, and then you can see if the person has those skills. So there's a lot of those kind of um skills based interviews that people say takes a lot of bias out bias about your past credentials, and maybe other kinds of

bias that might come in to the interview process. Another issue is, as you mentioned, employers have very little incentive to train people right now and to take risks on people. And if you think back, you know, fifty seventy five years bill joined a company and then they stayed there for the rest of their career, So there was loyalty from both sides, and both sides has had a lot

of incentive to invest in the other. But now a company doesn't know if an employee is going to take the skills they learned on the job and just go to the competitor down the street. And at the same time, an employee doesn't know if they you know, go and invest in new skills or some sort of retraining, is the company just going to lay them off next year and that investment won't have been worthwhile. So um, there's not that same loyalty and people don't have the same

incentive one. So one solution to that is apprenticeships, which is um something that Trump administration has talked about, as did the Obama administration. It's really a bipartisan approach and that's the idea of learning on the job. So someone is getting paid and they are doing the job UM while they're also you know, testing out their skills and learning um learning new skills. So so in that's in that sense the employer doesn't have to depend on a

school UM to teach these skills. I can actually keep to these skills. But at the same time, it's getting work out of the person and the person is getting paid UM, so that the incentives are more aligned on both sides. Do you think people shut themselves off from career possibilities because they aren't aware of how their skills might transfer, like could a tool like this help them with that? They absolutely shut themselves off from other curse

because they're not aware. I mean, I think when people I think, what's interesting to me about own itt is it includes these skills like communicating with people outside your company. That is an extremely valuable skill that not everyone is good at. If you're good at it, that could apply

to a ton of different jobs. But my guess is that when you ask people about what they do day to day, they might say, you know, oh, I do these spreadsheets and I have these meetings, But they don't necessarily think I'm a really good communicator and that is a skill I have that is essential to my job and could be essential, um in a in a completely

different career. So in that sense, I think these kind of tools that own it offers UM I hope that our chart offers, and also that these these nonprofits like Skillful and Opportunity at Work offer is being able to think of yourself a little bit differently. But it's also a challenge. One economist that I talked to, whose name is Lawrence Cats at Harvard, is a labor economist. He says it's often not a skills mismatch, but an identity mismatch.

So even if you do have the skills to do another job, it can be very hard to make that leap and to think of yourself as something different. If you thought of yourself as a welder your whole life, you know, maybe you could work in an automated factory behind a computer, but you thought of yourself as a welder. Your identity is that you work with your hands, and the idea of, you know, working behind a computer is just not your identity. So you might have skills that apply, um,

but you also need to make that mental leap. That's really interesting. Yeah, you had a couple of examples of anecdotes in your story. One was a I think like a laid off oil rig worker who who was retrained to program machines for advanced manufacturing. And and you had a paralegal who who changed careers to become a duela UM. And I wonder if you talked to those people about making that mental leap and whether they did it out of necessity or kind of what sparked them to do that.

So the oil rig worker did it purely out of necessity. He was unemployed, um, all the all all the mining plants in the area had been shut down, and he didn't think that he could get another job. He lived in Appalachia. This is all he knew how to do, and the work that he was doing simply no longer existed. And he found out about a training program to train out of work miners to do sort of computerized factory

work essentially. And I talked to the person who runs that program, and she said, it's actually really similar skills. It's working with your hands, understanding how machinery works. But these people didn't think of themselves that way. But he signed up for the training program because he really had no other choice. And he said, actually, it is pretty similar to my old job in a lot of ways, and it's different in some ways. And I learned those ways, but I was able to apply my old skip my

old skills now. The parallegal I talked to, she decided to become a doula and then a midwife because she decided she was interested in something else. She did not quite realize how much those skills overlapped. But after being a paralegal for so many years and she became a midwife, and she said, actually, there is so much overlap here,

so much more than I realized. For example, a lot of being a paralegal is you know, reading through a ton of documents and then making notes and writing in a really clear, concise way so that other lawyers working on the case can understand what that pile of documents is about and not have to read it themselves. Being a midwife requires seeing a patient and writing and communicating

in a really clear and concise way. You know where they're at with their health and their pregnancy, so that when a different midwife or a doctor comes in, or when they show up at a hospital and delivery, someone can look at their chart and understand exactly where they're at. So, you know, it's a skill that you might not think of,

and it's actually essential to both jobs. Yeah, it's it's super interesting, and it stands to reason that if you are if you are interested in a career change, and you're passionate about doing something, even if it feels really different, you might be drawn to it for a lot of the same reasons that you're drawn to your current career, Like those skills might line up because those are both you know, because those careers are both well suited to you exactly, and you know, it's a shame that there

is not an easier way right now to both see break down which skills you have and which skills might be accessible, and then you know, to convince employers that actually I can do this job. And and that's why I do think it is part of the responsibility falls on employers to think a little bit differently about how they hire and take risks on more people. Before I

let you go. There's just one more tool that you guys created at the Upshot that I wanted to chat with you about out and I'm not sure if you were directly involved in it, but it seems like it came from the same data set, which is a tool that lets you plug in your current job and find what job is your exact opposite. Did you work on that or was that just from the same data This was from the same data set that I've worked on with my colleague um Quattron Booie, who is also on

the Upshot. He's a graphics editor. And yeah, it's a it's a really cool graphic that tells you things, Like you know, we've been talking about job similarities and where they overlap. This is this is the opposite what's most different, So like a kindergarten teachers opposite job as a physicist, and a writer's opposite job is a mobile home installer,

for example. Is there any way a job seecret or somebody just like looking to improve themselves in their career, uh could use that tool as something constructive and not just sort of a fun a fun curiosity. I think so absolutely, because what it really does is help you focus on the nature of your job. You know, a lot of us go to work every day and we do our job, and like I was saying earlier, we

don't really realize which skills were using. Or maybe we realize the basic skills, but we don't understand the nitty gritty skills. And I think this tool of the opposite jobs tool helps you realize, um that your job is

really broken down into a lot of different skills. And if you start thinking about it that way, and so instead of thinking, well, I am a teacher, or I am a librarian, or I am a physicist, you think, well, I really have to do a lot of creative thinking and a lot of communicating, or you know, I really need to have a lot of gross gross motor coordination and stamina or whatever it is that might help you think about future career paths. Differently. Well, Claire, this was

really really fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. Thanks for inviting me. I think the kind of work that Claire did can give people a lot of hope who are in a position where they have to change careers and they just don't know where to start, like it can open up possibilities that they didn't even know we're there. But it

doesn't exactly solve the retraining question. If you wanted to be an elementary school teacher, you'd still have to start from square one and go back and get a teaching certificate or a degree um which can still be a daunting task. Right, I'm not going to walk into an elementary school and tell the principle to hire me because I'm a really good journalist's New York Times that I could do it, what's the problem. But it does show me that that might be a career path that I'd

be good at. So like, yes, you have to do the retraining. Even the people in Claire's article that she mentioned had to do some kind of retraining, but that retraining might not have been as hard as they would have expected because they had a lot of the skills and they didn't even realize it. So I think it's it's really always a great advice to take an inventory of your own skills. And I even, you know, I

was a career changer myself there. This advice can be useful for people who just want to change careers, as opposed to having to change careers because the economy has forced them out of what they're doing. I used to be a researcher and I changed into journalism, not because my skills aligned so well, just because I really wanted to be a journalist, but looking back, like, of course, the skills I had as a researcher are really applicable

to journalism. I basically asked people questions and wrote down what they said. And what's journalism journalism basically, And when the robots inevitably come for our journalism jobs, as they already are starting to do, we gotta we should take a look at our own skills. Yeah, what are we gonna do? The ones we're using and the ones we might have but aren't using right now, Like my modeling skills, Yeah,

get on it. Robots are never gonna be really good models, that's right, And now it's time for half bay takes, halfy fake takes. If you have a half big take you'd like to share with us, call our hotline at two and to six one seven zero one six six. This week we have a listener half big take on that very resonant topic of taking photographs with your work friends. Hey, ladies, this is Virginia from Maryland, UM, and I'm calling to

also tack onto the um picture half baked take. And I just want to say this is for all of the ladies out there. If you're taking a picture, a group picture for work, don't lean over. Don't lean over. You don't see guys doing that. Do you know? It makes you look weak, it looks it makes you look unprofessional. Don't do it. You can arrange yourselves that everyone can sit in the picture, So don't lean over. All right,

that's my halfday take. Thanks guys, Love you fine. So do we think she means like, if you're on the edge of the picture, you shouldn't you shouldn't kind of angle your body so that you get into the frame. You should just sort of like make sure that you're not on the end. I think that's more like don't conform to the picture, right, make the picture work for you. That's right. It's reminds me of a story I wrote

on power poses. Um, there is a big drama about researcher behind power poses, and there's there was a research argument that women are supposed to stand in certain ways to start themselves in the office. Like I've internalized that advice, like you're supposed to sit with your arms away from your body or something. It turned out to be false or that was what the scandal was about. But yeah, this is kind of like the power pose of taking

pictures with your coworkers. And ironically, uh, in this case, the power pose is not leaning in, right, m ladies, at least now when you're taking pictures, Becca, what is your brilliant thought that isn't quite brilliant enough to be its own story? This week, so I was on vacation and mine is related to coming back from vacation. No, we missed you, yea, I know. Um, it's about email maintenance while on vacation. I have strong opinions about this. I've even written about it. So I admit I half

wrote my half baked take as a regular take. I'm sorry, um, but I think we all stress about coming back to our email after vacation. Yes, some people even say just delete all your emails, don't read them, just start fresh, right, which I do fall closer to that side of things. But I think the key to happiness on the day you get back is if you can while you're on vacation just scan your inbox every day, every other day and just star things that seem like they might be important.

You can even open them and scan them, and then when you get back, you scroll through your inbox and you do ignore the things and just go to the starred things. You might miss some stuff, but it's okay. People will email you back and then you can respond to those things and it's maybe like ten emails instead of one. I love this. I totally agree with this because I think people criticize you if you check email while you're on vacation because it's like, oh, you don't

have work life balance. But you know what, if I'm on a two week vacation and I know in the back of my mind that there are emails piling up and one of them might be something kind of important, and I might miss it because it's like buried at the bottom of the pile. I'm just going to have like low level work anxiety about that while I'm on vacation, So like, what kind of work life balance is that when I could be every couple of days just taking a look and being like, Okay, I can prioritize that

eymoe when I get back. Also, it doesn't it doesn't take that much time. It's not very stressful because you're not actually responding or even thinking about the thing it's about. You're just looking at it and scanning and meaning like, oh, that center or a subject line seems like maybe I should look at it, but I'm not going to think about it now. And it's, by the way, it's a total myth that you can just like forget that you have a job while you're on vacation. So let's just

get rid of that. You're going to remember that you have a job you're going back to. So listen to me anyway, Francesca, what is your really important idea that you need to share. I want to talk about wireless headsets. These This is the worst thing to happen to corporate America since the Open office plan go on. So I guess the convenience of a wireless headset is that you don't have to deal with a piece of material connecting your phone headset to your phone, and you can get

up and walk around and take phone calls. Let me tell you what this does. This annoys your co workers. I think it's the wireless headset coupled with the open office that's really bad, because if you had your own room, you could just pay some walk around. However, I thought about this. I thought about this. The only time a wireless headset is not going to annoy other people because random people are gonna hear your phone call is if

you have your own office. But if you have your own office, you don't need a wireless headset because you could just put your call on speaker. So there's no good reason to use some wireless headset. If you want to walk around and stretch your legs and improve your blood circulation, or get your fitbit steps in or whatever, just I don't know, do it some other time. Do it on your own time. Don't bring your phone call

over to my desk. If it's if you're doing it because the phone call was so personal that you didn't want your coworkers to hear it, then imagine how people who you don't even work with, who have no idea who you are or feel about it. Mandatory wired headsets for everyone. Yeah, let's chain ourselves to our desks so that we understand decorum. You heard it here and this has been half big takes, half baked takes. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Game Plan.

I'm on Twitter at Francesca today and I'm at RZ Greenfield and you can call into our hotline and tell us anything you want at two on to six seven zero one six six. If you liked our show, please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and rate us, review us. Take a minute just to give us a shout out if you like us. The show is produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Henrickson. The head of podcast

is Alec McCabe and we will see you next week. Hi. Anyway, Francesca, what is your really important idea that you need to share? You don't have one, good question, You don't have one. Sorry, sorry,