HBR Guides to Managing Your Career Collection (6 Books)

CHAPTER 10

Test-Drive Your Path

by Dorie Clark

It’s impossible to know if you’ll really like a career direction until you try it out. To avoid making costly mistakes—and wasting your energy—take a test-drive. Here, you’ll read about people who apprenticed, volunteered, or job shadowed to discover their professional identities—and you’ll learn how to find these experiences for yourself.

Apprenticing

Joanne Chang was swept into her first job when she graduated from Harvard in 1991. Because she’d majored in math and economics, “it seemed natural to go into investment banking or management consulting,” she recalls. When a blue-chip management-consulting firm offered her a job, she grabbed it. But two years later—much of it spent on the road, advising ...