In the late 1980s, Everette Fortner was known around the halls of Kraft Foods (now Kraft Heinz) as the inventor of Lunchables Pizza. You have experienced this first part of his professional legacy if you were a kid basically…anytime since.
Nowadays, he’s creating lasting impact in a different way as head of the career center for undergrads at the University of Virginia, where he counsels first-time job seekers to take a design thinking-based approach to the job search.
Here’s Everette’s advice for how to do so:
Sitting on your parents’ basement sofa, staring at the TV screen, you start daydreaming about winning the lottery. Any way you can to avoid spending your entire senior year or even those few months after graduation looking for a job. The pressure of the question, “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” is daunting. Time for a reframe. A “re-what?” A reframe is just one of the many tools from the design-thinking toolkit that many college seniors and recent grads are learning to apply to their planning for the future. According to Jeanne Liedtke, faculty member at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and author of Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers, design thinking is “a problem-solving approach with a unique set of qualities: it is human centered, possibility driven, option focused, and iterative. We ask the question “What if anything were possible?” as we begin to create ideas.”
So, let us reframe. “If anything were possible, what would I do with my one wild and precious life?” Can you feel the difference? From this question springs hope and options, rather than dread and stress. Add to this question an insight about employment right now: the Bureau of Labor Statistics cites that the average number of jobs in a lifetime for baby boomers is 12—for Gen-Z that number will be even higher. So, relax, this first job is not going to be the last one.
How can design thinking help you right now with your search? Use this 4-step design-thinking framework to jumpstart your search today:
1) Create design criteria: design criteria are those recurring patterns in your life that have been important to you in the past and will be important to you in the future. Career design criteria paint a picture of what success will look like, based on themes you already see in your life.
Design criteria come from a variety of sources: values, interests, skills and workplace preferences to name a few. Try this: create a list of five values, three interests and two skills that define you. Using each of these, finish this sentence to create 10 design criteria: “If anything were possible, my career would…” For example, if a value that is important to you is financial security, your design criteria might read, “if anything were possible, my career would afford me enough money to take care of my family financially by the time I am thirty.” Or if an interest of yours is sports, your design criteria might read, “if anything were possible, my career would allow me time to participate in competitive sports every weekend.”
2) Brainstorm Possible Lives: this exercise requires help from a few friends (in design thinking lingo it’s called radical collaboration). Sit down first alone and then with friends and come up with as many possible lives/futures/jobs that you can imagine that might fit your design criteria. Once you have 10-20, then narrow down to three to start: what’s most probable or what’s expected might be one of the three, then pick a back-up plan if the first one were taken away from you. Finally, pick a third that you might pursue if money, fame and talent were not needed (here you might think “rock star” because you love to jam with friends, or “Ambassador to Croatia” because you love travel and politics.
Wow, it was that easy. An hour ago, you had no idea what you wanted to do, and now you have three possibilities. You are not committed yet, just interested.
3) Now, prototype. Prototypes are a tangible, low risk way to test your ideas and confirm your hypotheses. In the career context, two types of prototypes are particularly helpful: prototyping conversations and prototyping experiments. A prototyping conversation is a 20-30 minutes call with someone doing what you think you might want to do. Using LinkedIn, identify 3-5 people (alumni of your school might be a good place to start) in your desired field, reach out, make a connection, and ask them about their career. Prototyping conversations are similar to networking (which is another one of those scary adulting concepts), but focus on research and learning rather than job openings. What you learn in one conversation should lead to another, and then another. Eventually, you might find your way to job openings and hiring managers—and perhaps you have inadvertently impressed a few decision makers along the way. Since three-quarters of jobs are found through networking, this concept of prototyping conversations might just be a more approachable way for you to get started on your networking.
4) Finally, you need experience with your three possible lives. Experience will confirm (or disprove) that you like something and that you have an aptitude for it. But experience is hard to get without experience, right? That is why you need a prototype. What form of experience can you get, short of getting a job in that field? Here is where you need that group of friends one more time. Brainstorm ways to get experience. Examples might include taking an online class in this field via LinkedIn Learning or others, sourcing an online project through websites like Upkey or Parker Dewey, volunteering at a similar organization, or even just job shadowing someone for a day in the field in which you are interested.
Creating possibilities and executing prototypes will get you off the sofa today. Design thinking allows you to be creative and proactive in your job search. It’s about getting started, not finding the answer. “If anything were possible…” is an exciting way to start this journey, and a mindset that will help you find your first (but not last) answer to the question, “What should I do with my life?”