Considering Changing Your University Major? |
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| By Rodger Bailey | ||||
Lifecycles For instance, the field of teaching algebra has a lengthy lifecycle. There are few changes in the field of algebra over the decades. Teachers who make a career of teaching algebra tend to have an individual lifecycle of 15 to 25 years. They need things that remain the same. They are most content in circumstances where there is little or no change. So, they settle into a field where the field and the content of that field does not change for many decades. As an alternative example, the field of application software development has a fleeting lifecycle. Most software development projects are only 8 to 15 months. So, the people who will prosper in the application software development field must have a fleeting lifecycle. This field needs professionals who want to start something, finish it, and then move on to the next task. In between these two ends of the scale are those whose lifecycle is five to seven years. Most individuals are in this category. These are the individuals who are the backbone of the workforce in the USA. These are the individuals who merchandise, produce, keep up, transport, and offer customer service for most of the goods and services in our economy. Recognizing your own lifecycle can be easy. If you have a long work history, you explore your history of endeavors and find the pattern that you have lived in your endeavors. Have you had a progression of endeavors which are in the 5 to 7 years time-frame? Is your work experience organized around situations where you settle into projects where you build or maintain? If so, you may fit in the five to seven year lifecycle group. Have all of your endeavors been doing one thing? If you have spent decades doing the same work and you have maintained a level of comfort with the projects and content of your work, you most likely fit in the 15 to 25 year lifecycle group. If your work history is a long list of short duration endeavors which you start, complete, and then move on, you probably fit in the fleeting lifecycle group. Which is best? There is no group that is better or worse than the others. Each group fills a need in our economy’s work cycles. Some of these lifecycle groups fit better for certain careers or for certain endeavors. If you are a student in university, you don’t have a history to look back on to find out your patterns. You need another way of understanding your patterns and making appropriate choices about your career. Before that, you need to understand a little bit more about these lifecycle groups. The Alarm Clock Without respect to which of these groups you are in, everybody carries an alarm clock in their head which lets them know that their cycle is terminating. They might really like their endeavor and the others they work with, but they find themselves reading the ‘Help Wanted’ section in the newspaper. They begin looking for things to not like about their job, the people, the location, the weather, or anything else they can use to think it is time to change their place of employment. They start finding themselves thinking about moving on to the next endeavor. This is the usual method we use to know that our endeavor lifecycle is terminating, and we need to begin a different cycle. But, starting a different cycle does not have to be a different job or career. If you know this is your group, you can plan for the shifts you make from one cycle to the next. If you catch this ‘alarm’ when it first starts to ring, you can make comparatively small changes and re-start your lifecycle. For instance, when you get a promotion on the job, your clock is reset, and your cycle starts over. When you get new kinds of tasks on the job, your clock is reset, and your cycle starts over. When you move to a different project in your company, your clock is reset, and your cycle starts over. But if you do not make the change you need to make, when your lifecycle ends, you start to get depressed. And, the longer you wait to make the change, the more massive the change needs to be to re-start your lifecycle. If you need to make the change and you do not make it, you get depressed. The longer you wait before you make the change, the deeper the depression. When you first notice the signals that you need the change, the change does not need to be very large. New task assignments or changing your work hours are usually enough. But if you wait, you may need to change the company you work for or you may need to change your career. What Can You Do? This could be a problem. Do you want to change your major because you really don’t like this career, or is it because you have finished your lifecycle? You should obtain a career assessment using a system which helps you understand many of your patterns including your lifecycle. With this kind of assessment, you can make reasoned choices about your major, your career, and your life. |
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