This is the second in a series of articles addressing the eight different stages of the job search and the tangible things you can do to navigate them. Read the first article on mapping your career path.
Earlier this year, we asked 200,000 people around the globe about what stage they were at in their job search and the majority answered, 'finding my purpose.' The good news is so many people are lucky enough to carry this burden of choice. The bad news, is we have been inundated with vagaries of 'follow your passion' without being offered any concrete tools. So, how do we discover our purpose, and more pressing, what do we do until we figure it out?
Finding your purpose constitutes the second stage of the job hunting process. Getting through this stage has less to do with waiting for that single moment of ecclesiastical inspiration and more to do with some basic research and hard-earned experience.
Purpose often comes from working, from the momentum you gain when you ask questions, and begin building your idea with people you care about. In order to know what to build we have to start broadly by choosing an industry to work in. If you don't know which one, consider mapping your non-linear career path and then come back to the steps below.
Every industry today is being reinvented in ways that do good and the companies leading the charge are the ones that are going to hire you. Here are the questions you need to start asking in order to find the often invisible companies that will help you discover and pave your path to meaningful, fulfilling work, all while earning a paycheque. It's purpose meets practicality.
Why does industry X exist?
What fundamental need does your industry meet? Does it ensure that people travel great distances quickly, or does it help us understand the world? How different do these needs look if you zoomed out 10, 20 or even 50 years from now?
What's broken?
Knowing the current limitations, flaws and challenges of your industry can help you identify the gaps that you could fill and any opportunities for innovation. How could you help this industry function better and more sustainably and efficiently? Where are there opportunities for reinvention?
What are the mavericks doing?
Find the people who are already working on these core questions and rethinking your industry from the ground up. Track down someone who's been in the industry for 10 or more years and ask them who they thing the mavericks are. Get to know the relevant upstarts, what questions these companies are asking and how they have found funding that allowed them to realize the answers.
Who are the winners?
Understanding who profits as a result of your industry's improved redesign will help you immediately recognize who will hire you, or who will eventually acquire the company you work for. You can guarantee that those companies already firmly entrenched in answering this question are looking for ways to recreate and rebuild in response to our changing environment: they are the ones that will hire you.
These are the tangible questions that will set you down the path of purpose. They will help you identify the companies and begin to see opportunities to put the skills you have built over the course of your career to work for good.
Now that you have answered these questions, Make a company list, talk to a company you do not know and then send this e-mail to the company you want to work for.
Dev Aujla (@devaujla) is the author of Making Good: Finding Meaning, Money and Community in a Changing World, creator of the website 50waystogetajob.com, and the CEO of Catalog, a strategic advisory and recruiting company that works with companies that do good.