Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

Stephen Shortt is the CEO of CareerFit a company that helps people find a dream career, not just a job. As a career talent strategist, Stephen is on a mission to make the world a better place, with happy people in fulfilling, rewarding careers. Whether for yourself, your children, or students, or maybe you’re an HR professional keen on understanding and navigating the future of work, you'll find the information presented in this podcast helpful.

In this conversation we talk about :

• Why it’s crucial to find a career that aligns with your interest.
• How can parents and schools can help kids to identify and pursue the right career path.
• Why if you don’t like your job and are considering switching careers, how to make the best decisions to take action and steps to follow to pivot into a job you have a genuine passion for, one that will translate into a fulfilling career.
• The future of work considering the rise of AI. How to prepare for these changes in a career you are interested in.
• How you can differentiate between a fleeting interest and a genuine passion that can translate into a fulfilling career.
• Advice for those standing at the crossroad, unsure of which path to take in leaving a job they don’t like and moving on to doing something different.
• Get Inspired!

 

Transcript

My guest today is Stephen Shortt. He's the CEO of CareerFit, a company that helps people find a dream career, not just a job.

As a career and talent strategist, Stephen's on a mission to make the world a better place with happy people and fulfilling, rewarding careers.

We're gonna talk about why it's crucial to find a career that aligns with your interest and passion, how parents and schools can help kids identify and pursue the right career paths.

And if you don't like your job, then consider switching careers.

How to make the best decisions and take steps to pivot into a job for which you have a genuine passion for, one that will translate into a fulfilling career.

Whether for yourself, your children or students, maybe you're an HR professional, keen on understanding and navigating the future of work.

My first question, Stephen, is how did you get started in your career?
And I trust you're enjoying it.

Yeah, I love my job. So I've grown up in two family businesses.

The first one was an English language school.

We taught English as a foreign language or English as a second language, which it's more commonly known as in the US.

And I did that for about 20 years until I kind of started not enjoying the nature of the work anymore.

The industry had changed.

The type of student that was coming was changing.

And before I had this kind of, had done any work on my why and my core purpose, like what I wanted to be spending my time doing, I could feel that it wasn't really in line with what I enjoyed doing anymore.

So that's when I spent a bit of time going through, started off with the Simon Sinek, start with why stuff, spoke to a lot of mentors, spoke to a lot of people.

And that's when I realized actually my interest lay now in the other family business, which is, which was and is a much smaller business, that does career guidance and successful succession planning and selection for companies.

And then that spoke more to what I wanted to be spending my time doing.

And so I bought that company probably five, six years ago now.

And I've been focusing on that since we sold the other business just before COVID in 2019.

Nice.

It's helpful when you make people's lives better, huh?

My original why, like the first iteration of why, what I wanted to be spending my time doing was I wanted to help people to help themselves.

That was the first kind of playing with that language.

And then it's really comes down to helping people to aspire to a better future and then empowering them to get there.

And it really comes down to, for me, and how we deliver that and how we are impactful to other people's lives is through careers.

So helping people to find fulfilling, rewarding careers is the main thing, which then makes it more important.

Because in the end, people do have to help themselves, right?

You can only give them career guidance, help, strategies, like do this homework, but they've got to do the work, right?

Yeah, I mean, we do some training as well.

We do some helping people to improve their skills on those things.

But again, it comes down to different people.

And somebody, what one person finds a fulfilling, rewarding career, another person, it'll be their definition of hell on earth.

Oh, sure.

Being able to understand what a fulfilling, rewarding career for you might be very, very different, even for somebody in your own family, and have a very different career path, because of a mixture of personality, of interests, of abilities, and just what they want out of life.

So, being able to understand that, to have the self-awareness yourself, and coming to somebody like us, or using one of our tools, to be able to help you to get that self-awareness, and then actually go down that path is what I enjoy doing the most.

And we're lucky that everybody doesn't want to be doing the same thing, right?

Absolutely.

Otherwise, the world would be a really boring place.

Yeah, nobody wants to be a farmer, nobody wants to be an engineer, everybody wants to be an artist or a singer.

Yeah, how do we eat?

And then you have farmers who, green thumbs, they love to farm, right?

That's all they would do.

They're like, I don't want to be an engineer.

So it's probably important, especially with the question how parents can help their kids identify and pursue the right career without the parents or other people inadvertently, accidentally pushing their own agendas or even not on purpose.

Maybe somebody, a child or an adult who wants a career change looks at somebody else's life and goes, God, they're so happy.

If only I did that.

There's two different pitfalls that people can fall into.

One is the parents or the mentor or career guidance counselor in school or something like that.

It's always well-meaning advice.

No parent is telling their kid, oh, you should do this because I want you to be miserable.

Or no career guidance counselor is saying, oh, you should study this because they don't like the kid, and they think that they want to see them unhappy for the rest of their lives.

Part of the problem is what got the parents here is not necessarily going to get the kids there.

The world is changing.

The world has changed so much even in the last 20 years.

So we have, I do a talk in schools where I talk about 10 different careers that did not exist when the kids started school.

So there's no way that school can be preparing them for these careers.

So the whole notion of, well, I know what's right from my kid because I know my kid the best.

Okay, you know facets about your kid.

You might not know the entirety of what drives your kid.

And you probably don't know what the future work is unless your field of interest and expertise is actually studying that on a day to day basis and understanding where it's going or having a feel for where it's going.

I had one case a couple of months ago with a kid who, in America, so we were looking at, we had a couple of people doing our CareerFit test in America, and the counselor said there was two really distinct areas in this kid's career path.

He was in college already and he was studying computer science.

And he said he got a couple of careers around computers, but he got other stuff in, I can't actually remember, I think it was sports management or something like that.

And the counselor was sitting down with me going, this can't be right, like there can't be these two completely different areas within the same report.

First of all, absolutely there can be, because how many interests do you have?

I mean, you're a rocket scientist, you're a mountaineer.

So there's plenty of different things that happen to us where we can find interest, we can find fulfillment, and we can find something that's rewarding, we can spend our time doing it.

And there are careers in all of those areas.

So it comes down to what you want to do right now.

But actually, when they sat down with that kid, he said, yeah, well, I'm studying this now because this is kind of the safe thing that everybody's telling me to do.

But actually, I would love to do all these other things.

I just can't see that future for myself at the moment.

I can't see that future for myself, was his words.

And that, to me, is a crying shame.

Okay, you're doing this, you find an area, there is some interest and there's some excitement about it, and you can do it, but how long will you actually enjoy that and find that fulfilling and rewarding?

Whereas, you're always looking on the sliding doors, saying, what if I went that direction?

What if I had a couple of years of it?

Sounds like part of the problem is people have something they're good at, and then something else they want to do, maybe they'll get it or not.

They're ignoring that potential path for what they would prefer, because they don't know how to ask for help.

They're assuming in their head, and is this correct Stephen?

They're assuming in their head, because no one's ever asked them in the right way, hey, you know, no one really knows that you want to do this.

We didn't know.

Like we didn't know.

And if you had said so, we could help you?

That kind of thing?

So there is an element as well though, especially with parents who might be more risk averse.

Like the older we get as humans, the more risk averse we get typically, like stereotypically that's what we do, because we have more to lose, or we're frailer or whatever.

So there is a sense of, that's very hard, it's a very tough industry to break into, or it's a very new thing, we're not sure if there's stability in that, so pick the safe route.

So the kids might be getting from early age, even though they might say, oh, I want to be this, I want to be that, okay, okay, okay, that's fine, but look, pick the safe route, and then you can dream about that later, because the parents want you, the parents are protecting you.

It's always from a place of love, it's always from the best meaning advice that they can come up with, because they're trying to help the kids.

How do you work with that?

Do you just explain both paths, the pros and cons?

Explaining both paths, but also trying to get the parents in particular to remember, hey, do you remember what you were like at that age?

I mean, you're doing stuff now, you might have taken the safe road, but actually, what if you had done the other thing?

To also explain that the world has changed so much that what might have been a flight of fancy?

Like, how many people when we were growing up, for example, when we were teenagers, maybe I'm a bit older than you, maybe, would have thought, oh, I'd love to be on TV, or I'd love to be on radio.

And now there's people making a really fine living for themselves hosting YouTube channels, hosting podcasts, to be able to get that, to have that sense of there isn't the same number of gatekeepers, like there's X number of radio waves and there's X number of TV stations, so the number of people proportionally is much greater for the people who want to do something, who get to do something.

So now, I mean, who would have thought when we were kids that there are people who are getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to play video games online?

And make TikTok videos.

And make TikTok videos.

Like it's so unbelievable that this is what the technology has given us.

So being able to understand that just because in our generation, or our parents' generation, those things didn't exist, and those opportunities didn't exist, but for a select few that had mana rained down upon them, there's a lot more opportunities for people to be able to be fulfilled and be rewarded.

I see the people, for example, making, like you said, for example, they're making money making videos, TikTok, whatever.

And you're like, oh, they're making money.

You know, probably that just making money is not going to make you happy or fulfilling.

So what are the signs someone's in a career that doesn't align with their passion and their strengths, and it's time to get out?

So I think it was Jeff Bezos had this line of stress only exists when you're doing something you don't love.

So if you're feeling stressed and burnt out, it's because a lot of the time, you're not really passionate about what you're doing.

Does this external pressure or does this external difficulty that's put upon you while you're trying to get through it?

Whereas we've probably all had a puzzle or a sports event or a personal thing, a personal project or something, where we've put in the hours, or we've just dived into it.

We get into this zone of, this is amazing, I could do this.

I'm actually getting energized from putting in all this hard work, and I'm getting energized from doing this.

That's an area where you can start to see, hey, there's some energy around this, there's some alignment around this.

Feeling the stress and burnout, a lot of the times, because it's not actually what we want to be doing, it's not what we're necessarily all that interested in doing.

Now look, there's plenty of people out there who are doing jobs, and they feel kind of trapped in those jobs because they've got bills to pay.

I'm not a happy hippie going, oh, just give up your earthly possessions and go off and follow your path to whatever fun, non-productive stuff that you want to do.

I mean, we all have to live, we all have to feed ourselves, we all have to pay bills and all the rest of it.

But just because a year or two of difficulty might unlock a much happier route for you, whether that's going back to college or taking a lower paid job somewhere else to be able to get the experience in it, there are things that you can do.

It's up to you, it's up to each person to decide, do they want to take that pain for a year or two or three or whatever it is, to be able to have those 20, 30, 40 years of happiness if they feel that they're trapped in that environment.

Most people would say, yes, I'm willing to give it a year or two or three if it's going to make me happy.

Key is, you see this question asked a lot, especially people moving to California, United States or some big city that's expensive.

Oh, I have blah, blah, blah, dollars saved.

I'm moving there to do this.

Do you think I can do it in six months?

The question really is, how do you differentiate a fleeting interest from a genuine passion that you know, okay, this is it, time to dive in.

This is, I've got one year to do this.

How do you know?

How do you know that's going to be it?

I mean, if we talk about this from, if we're talking about California, so we're talking about a lot of musicians and actors and artists and things like that, there's California's, Hollywood has always been kind of the, almost the mecca for all this.

We have, in our assessments, I mean, we can test people's verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning skills.

And you might have somebody who has a keen interest, who absolutely loves being an actor and acting.

But we've no way of assessing whether they're actually any good at acting.

We've no way of assessing whether they're open to learning to get better, or if they just have in their head, I am an actor, I am an amazing actor.

And this is what I should do.

So there are elements of getting expert opinion or getting people...

Look, experts could be wrong.

I'm not saying that you need to just pick one expert, and then if they say no, then that's it, give up on your dreams.

Some of the big success stories will tell you, you know, people told me not to do this.

They told me I was bad at it.

Don't do that.

You'll never succeed.

And those are the ones that succeed big, so you've got to believe in yourself, know it in your heart.

And I mean, we see all these stories all the time with the actors, for example, who made it big.

Now, there's a lot of that is outside of your control.

I mean, there are still gatekeepers for the movies, but if you're interested in acting and you're building your own thing and doing something even on YouTube or podcasting or making your own music and releasing it yourself, there are plenty of avenues.

And TikTok is allowing all kinds of artists to blow up directly with the fans the same way as touring gigs used to do in the 70s and 80s and musicians would tour around and build up their fan base.

So there's plenty of other ways of doing it.

So give me an example, because you do this every day.

So an example of something less artistic or a real pipe dream, but somebody say, for example, they think they want to be a doctor or an engineer.

Like, how would you pick?

I want to be a doctor or an engineer.

I'm a smart guy either way.

So even if you're a smart guy, your interests might be, let's say, medicine.

Really what we start to go into, especially when somebody says, and I just had this conversation with somebody yesterday about engineering.

What is it about engineering?

First of all, what part of engineering?

Engineering is so broad.

The same as medicine.

Medicine is so broad.

So when people say, oh, I want to be an engineer, okay, fabulous.

But to do what?

Oh no, I like mathematics and I like physics.

So I'm going to be an engineer.

Okay, but to do what?

Because we always give the advice to people, pick your career over your course.

Because if you just go into a course, if you go into a college course and you just go, okay, I like this subject, so I'm going to study it, with no regard to actually how you're going to spend the next, the rest of your life trying to apply that.

So what I tell students in particular is that I have no real interest in your next four to five years of your academic career.

I'm really interested in the next 40 to 50 years of your actual career.

What are you going to spend your time doing that you enjoy?

An example that I use with students a lot is, you might be really passionate about politics.

You might really want to make the world a better place, and you might want to enact change, and you see some things that are not right in your world, and you're very passionate about politics.

But you might not want to be a politician.

You might be a horrible politician.

How do they figure that out?

Do they find a mentor, like someone who's already a politician, and go spend a day with them, who's already an engineer, and spend a day in the office with them if they can?

So part of it is doing a little bit of research.

Whether you're spending a day, or whether you're just digging in, or using a tool like ours, to actually understand what's actually involved in that job, not the overall idea of being a teacher.

We tell people what's actually involved in the career.

Because when you understand what's actually involved in the career, instead of the romanticized version of it, that's when a lot of people go, oh, that's not what I thought it was.

And that's where a lot of people end up being in the wrong career, because they studied something, because they think they're going to enact change.

Like in politics, for example.

You might be a fantastic speaker.

You might be a fantastic creative thinker.

So you could actually be better off going off and being a marketing director, or a marketing manager for a firm, and being able to build something unique.

But you might have a real passion in local politics.

So you can take a lot of your interests and a lot of your expertise, and be able to support local politicians, who then have to go through all of the dogma of making deals, and compromises, and going to committees, and listening to all the people, and all the stuff which is not the...

You're in the business...

making some speech and all the rest of it.

But you are able to take your interests and your talents in a marketing sphere, and be much happier being a marketing director, and a communications director, or manager, or whatever, and being interested in politics, or being able to use the bits and pieces on the bits that you enjoy, and you get the fulfillment and the reward in both sides.

As opposed to somebody who goes and studies politics, and then gets almost trapped in political science, and going, this is not what I sign up for.

I just want to be making speeches, and I want to be helping people to share their ideas.

But actually, politics is so much more in the background of it.

So, being able to understand what's actually involved in the job, and actually what parts of the job you're interested in.

And how would you do that?

Say back to, I want to be a doctor or an engineer.

If I want to be a doctor, do I maybe sign up for a nursing assistant class first, just to spend time at a hospital or with doctors, or to make sure first?

Or how do you...

You could reach out to people and go, hey, I'm interested in doing this.

Can I buy you lunch?

So I can just understand more about what your job actually entails and what parts of the job that you enjoy.

And you might find people...

Let's say you say somebody who wants to be a doctor, and we see this a lot where we get my mother is a doctor, or my father is a doctor, or worse, both my parents are doctors, so I want to be a doctor, I want to go into medicine.

But actually, they don't like people.

They're not good at people.

They're not good at...

But what they enjoy is the process side of things, and they enjoy figuring stuff out.

So actually, maybe being a doctor is not the right thing for them, but they have grown up in the world of medicine, so they have a real interest in medicine, because they have it around them all the time, and they do get their curiosity peaked by this.

But maybe into some kind of scientific research, maybe into medical research is the best way for them to go, because they're able to work in a lab, be very objective and very controlled about how they do something.

So understanding what's actually involved in the job, but also understanding what your actual interests are.

It's not medicine as a whole.

It's certain facets of certain parts of medicine.

How do we align those two things to set you up for success?

And you do all that in your company.

You have a way of explaining to people, this is how the day-to-day really works.

So we've actually built our own interest inventory, which is a series of questions that ask you if this was a part of your job, if this was a part of your job, if this was a part of your job.

But it's actually what's involved.

I've seen stuff before where it's, do you like engineering?

Oh, well then, funnily enough, engineering is going to be one of the careers that you're going to get.

Or do you like the idea of teaching?

And there's lots of people in school who love the idea.

They have this romanticized version of teaching.

My wife is a teacher, and she loves her job.

But when she did the assessments, when we were beta testing and getting it turned out, she didn't get teacher as one of her jobs, because we were able to understand in the questions, what are the fundamental parts?

What do teachers spend most of their time doing?

Teaching kids how to read and write, for example, is a really core part of what teachers do.

And there are a lot of teachers who just don't enjoy that.

They enjoy all the other elements of it, but 60% of what it is is teaching kids to read and write, essentially.

So she didn't get teacher as one of her careers, but she got lots of other careers that were honed on the side of teaching that she really enjoys.

Did you fix your algorithm, though?

Did it need work, or you were able to notice that?

No, she was blown away by the careers that she got.

There were careers in there that she had never heard of, that she said, oh my God, how do I do that?

Because that sounds like the ideal job for me.

She loves teaching, she loves doing what she's doing.

She actually does enjoy teaching kids how to read and write.

And she's a Spanish teacher, so it's a bit more communicative anyway.

But her plan is once our two daughters are finished secondary school, which there's only a couple of years left, she's going to look at retraining to go to do one of the careers that is on that list, because it sounds so appealing to her.

Which one was that?

The one that she really fell in love with was a hospital play specialist.

So people who work, they're educators who work with kids in hospital who are terminally ill or who are seriously ill who can't attend regular school, but they still need to learn.

So it's not reading and writing, but it's learning through play, it's learning through communication and being able to overcome some of these issues.

It's still a little teaching.

It is still a little teaching, but it's not teaching 60% of your time reading and writing a math.

So there are elements of the bits that she really enjoys about teaching.

So that's one of the things that she loves.

Okay, so that brings me to a question.

For someone standing at a crossroad, take her, for example, what advice do you give them to make a decision of how to transition?

And should they really transition?

Does it look good on paper?

Does this really want to do?

I have a great career job teaching.

I'm vested.

I can retire as a teacher.

I'm making lots of money.

How do you make the decision?

How do you actually transition?

So if you are in a role, and there are plenty of my wife's colleagues who are delighted.

They love their job.

They love teaching.

They love every aspect of it.

They love more of it than they don't love.

So they're staying in it.

They want to stay in it because they enjoy it.

If you're happy, if you're happy in your job, and you're feeling fulfilled and you're feeling rewarded, everybody could always do it a pay rise.

Everybody wants more money up to a certain point.

But after a certain point, money is irrelevant.

Not irrelevant, but studies show, I think it's about something like $150,000 or $200,000 or something like that.

Once you go past that, your level of happiness doesn't improve in relation to your money.

So I don't, even though it's rewarding, is partly to do with money, but actually feeling that you're doing something that you enjoy doing, that's what I'm more concerned about.

So if you're not happy, then the simple answer is you should change.

You should start looking around.

Not happy is kind of a relative scale.

I'm going to pretend I'm a teacher.

I love kids or students teaching.

The administration I could care less for so much, all the rules, regulations, kind of in the middle, and I'm making good money.

How do I make that decision?

I'm not sure if I take this other career path, if I change careers into the hospital setting, you mentioned.

That sounds attractive.

I would be also teaching or helping people.

I'd be working with people, make good money.

How am I going to know if I'll end up in the same boat?

It's okay, money.

It's okay, but it's still not it.

And how do I make the decision to really vest, like we talked about earlier, like, okay, I've got a year.

This is what I'm going to do.

How do you coach people to make...

They've got to decide it for themselves, but what can they do to help them make the decision?

As you said, they've got to decide for themselves.

Like everything is...

Two people standing side by side who are the same age, who are from the same town, but have slightly different interests, they could potentially come to two very different decisions at that particular crossroad.

So it's so unique and so...

They've got to know themselves, know themselves and get all the data.

They've got to know themselves, or they've got to be able to sit down with somebody who can ask the questions for them to uncover stuff about themselves.

So being able to sit down with somebody who has the experience in careers in general, and not necessarily knowing the ins and outs of each of those two particular jobs.

I mean, there are millions of different jobs that are out there, and different careers that are out there.

We have a database of 1,272 careers, but even within careers, then there are slightly different nuances, depending on whether you're a marketing manager in this company, or a marketing manager in this company, whether you're more process driven, or whether you're more creative driven.

But the people who are at those roles, or at that crossroads, what we would do, first of all, ideally, sit down and get them to do our assessment, so they get a list of careers that are based on their interests and their abilities.

So we can actually see, okay, well, this is a potential solid career path for you.

But then we will go, okay, in order to get you from here to there, this is what will be involved, whether it's retraining, so taking a year off and going back to school, or whether it's doing a night course for two years, or whether it's being able to take your existing skills and are they immediately transferable.

I'll give you my quick backstory on myself being an engineer.

Now, this is back a while, so the statistics, the database, there was no AI yet.

Okay, what's the computer spit out?

I should do?

I was in calculus.

I wanted to be an engineer.

The top one was bus driver.

Well, I like people.

So I think a lot of questions were skewed that way.

Any of my counselors, he's like, you know, Dan, you're taking calculus.

He didn't push engineering on me.

He's like, you know, you should really consider yourself, the way he put it, lucky or unique.

Unique is a key word.

And it might not just be engineering.

It could be medicine or something else.

Like, you know, even though your computer said you were good at that, maybe you should consider you really have a talent for this and you want to do it, right?

So I had the engineering idea.

Of course, we all want, I mean, money is a big thing.

So at that time, a lot of people making money in the stock market, killing it.

So maybe you want to be a stockbroker.

So fortunately, somebody suggested, you know what you do is, like you said, Stephen, call someone up that's in the industry.

I called the stockbroker and I said, can I come to your office for an hour at lunch?

I just want to see what you do.

And he said, sure.

He was an alumni too at the same college.

So I went through the college to find him.

He actually told the college, hey, I'm available for mentorship if people want to talk to me and see what I like about my job.

So I go and it was real quick.

Lunchtime, how's it going?

He's like, yeah, I couldn't meet you in the morning because the stock market on the East Coast opens three hours earlier.

So I have to be at work at five or six a.m.

And I'm like, well, how do you like your job?

He didn't say I hate my job.

He basically kind of said, though, I don't like my job.

I'm like, why do you do it?

Well, I know the answer.

It's the money, and that's all I needed to know.

The guy was really unhappy, but at a nice office and making a lot of money, I'm like, it doesn't seem like it's worth the money, Daniel.

So that's how I ended up back in engineering.

Speaking of which, you're involved with the AI, like helping people grasp this whole idea of how is AI going to affect the work tomorrow?

Like, if I'm training for a job today and AI is coming big, so how do you prepare people for the rise of artificial intelligence in terms of when you help them find a job?

So as I have it, we don't really use, we don't use AI in matching the careers.

It's all based on experience of what is actually in the job market.

And our experience is we do both sides of it.

We do selection for companies and we do career guidance, so we know what's what.

We do use AI for a little bit of making sure that the content is all aligned, that we have the same type of content and the same type of data correctly inserted in the different places for the career descriptions after we've fed it in.

But I do believe, I'm personally, I'm an AI optimist.

I had a, I won't say a heated conversation, but I had an after dinner conversation with my brother-in-law recently who is, he would be more of an AI pessimist, and thinking that it's all gone to, it's going to eradicate us, and basically Skynet is coming, and we're going to live in the matrix.

I'm an optimist.

I'm an AI optimist.

I think AI is going to be a fantastic tool, which is going to be embedded in everything that we do.

I don't think AI can actually think for itself.

Maybe in 20 years it can, but right now, all it is is a statistical prediction.

So it's not really affecting your...

It's not really affecting your...

No, I do believe it is.

I mean, I use it to help me refine my ideas.

I use it to help me refine blog posts and video scripts to structure stuff.

And it's fantastic at creating kind of the grunt work of going, okay, well, I have this idea, this idea, this idea.

How do I structure this all together and then write it out?

It's just a word processor.

It's a helpful word processor.

But I've seen people use it for all kinds of stuff, for idea generation, for code, for all this kind of stuff.

I firmly believe that AI is not going to take your job for the vast majority of people.

I believe, though, that somebody with AI might take your job.

Somebody who knows how to use AI will be able to do the work of two people, one person will be able to do the work of two or even three people with the right tools in AI to be able to create stuff.

But I firmly believe that AI will actually replace, sorry, will create more jobs than it replaces.

So the same way as the printing press, the same way as Google, the same way as all of these different innovations, there are careers that pop up, like prompt engineer is one of them, which just emerged in the last kind of two years, and people being able to actually understand enough to be able to get stuff out of AI, I think there's going to be far more jobs created by AI than there are replaced.

So understanding that, I think everybody needs to understand AI and how they can use it in their day to day without relying on it too much, so as they give up their sense of creativity or their ability to think critically.

That's great.

So to summarize, circling back to our two possible case scenarios, one is we have a student who's in high school, college, not sure of what they want to do.

To wrap things up and recap, what can they and parents in schools do to help the student?

Like today, like if someone's at this point, like a listener at this point, what can they do right now?

I mean, at the risk of name dropping my own product, obviously doing CareerFit, doing CareerFit, doing the assessments where we do your interest inventory, your verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning assessments, and we will give you a personalized report giving you highly specific 16 careers.

If you don't want to go down the road of doing that report, if you just want to do your own research, I would encourage you to spend as much time as possible trying to figure out what it is that you enjoy doing.

And now, when I say what you enjoy doing, it's not the, like we said earlier, it's not the broad things, oh, I like engineering.

It's like, what is it?

What aspect of engineering do you like?

Is it like process?

Is it building?

Is it chemicals?

Is it computers?

What is the area that you spend, that you could spend hours doing even if you weren't getting paid for it?

Then take that interest, like what are those interests and where do they apply?

And you might have to interview hundreds of people to be able to figure out, okay, where is, because computer science, like if you're interested in computer programming, that's everywhere, that's in every industry.

So you can be a computer programmer for games, you can be a computer programmer for parking lots.

I mean, there's all kinds of areas that you can do this in, so then figuring out what your interest is.

When, and figuring out yourself, figuring out how you want to combine these things, and then being able to talk to those experts to make sure that you understand, not necessarily the experts, but the people who are in those careers, so as you can understand, actually, is my understanding of the role actually what the role is?

And what advice, would it be similar advice for the adult who's already in a job, doesn't like their job, and is thinking of making a change?

It's exactly the same thing.

What are the elements of your job that you enjoy?

What are the things that you enjoy doing?

What are other industries or other areas that you can apply those to?

So I actually wrote a free ebook last year called Your Next Career, which you can download for free on yournextcareer.com.

And it's exactly for that.

It's for people who are at a crossroads to have been in their career for a while and gone, I don't like this anymore.

I want to do something different.

The key metric we talked about, how do you know is the level of stress?

How happy are you?

How happy are you in your job?

So for some people, that's stress.

For some people, it's boredom.

For some people, it's resentment.

Now, you could also be, you could also, I told you, I just launched this thing, whyyouhateyourjob.com yesterday.

It's some of the key reasons.

So you could be in the right career, just in the wrong culture.

So you might be in the wrong company, where you have really terrible leadership, where you have a bad culture, or you have a misalignment as to what you sign up for.

So I'm not saying that if you're not happy, you should just jump ship and do something completely 180 in a different direction.

But you need to be able to explore your options.

Is it that you're just not happy where you are, but you actually enjoy what you're doing?

Then we need to change that element of it.

But if you're saying, I really don't enjoy the job, and if I look at what other people are doing in my industry in the same role, I don't enjoy that.

So I need to either change industry completely, or I need to change career completely to something that aligns more with my interest.

There's a lot of work involved in this.

There's a lot of research, there's a lot of self-knowledge, there's a lot of self-awareness that needs to be gained from that.

Or you can shortcut all of that by doing something like CareerFit, or going and speaking to a career guidance counselor and getting their expertise and their knowledge.

And what's one last example of, for you recently in your company, someone you've helped, an adult who's changed careers, what were they doing before and what did you get them, what did you help, where did they end up finally?

So I had one guy who's, he grew up in a family business, so I do a lot of stuff with family businesses, but this guy grew up in a family business in logistics, trucks.

So they were moving stuff around, they were a logistics company, they put loads of stuff in the back of trucks and shipped them all over the British Isles.

He kind of enjoyed it, he liked it, but he wasn't passionate about it, it wasn't kind of his area of interest.

And when he did the CareerFit stuff, logistics was one of the things, because he has an interest in it, like he enjoys doing bits and pieces of it.

The other one was to do with Formula One.

One of the other 16 careers was around Formula One and fast driving and things like that.

Racing cars, yeah.

So we had a quick debrief, and we went through the careers and what he liked about this career and what he liked about that.

Oh, I love the sound of that.

But he doesn't necessarily, he doesn't think he's going to be the driver of the Formula Ones.

He just wants to be in that world.

So we started to put together the two of those things.

And there are companies that handle all of the logistics for Formula One because they have to go from place to place.

The cars, the tracks, the equipment, all the bits and pieces.

So a light bulb went off over his head as I was talking to him.

He's like, oh my God, I want to go be a logistics manager for Formula One and travel the world with Formula One cars doing the bits and pieces that I love doing.

So he went off and started doing that.

As far as I know, working, this is about a year ago, so I have lost track of him, but as far as I know, he was working his way into one of those companies that does logistics for one of the race teams.

It's probably really easy for him to get that job because on his resume, he's already good at logistics, and he loves race car driving.

And he found that because in your database was that connection in your system at CareerFit.

Nice.

That's going to make you feel good.

Sorry, that particular role didn't.

That's a very niche role, but he got logistics and he got Formula One.

So when we tease them out, you still get 16 careers.

So there's still a lot to choose from, but it's 16 that are highly focused towards you.

And then you can start looking, what if I pair two of these?

Or what if I pair three of these?

Or what if I looked at this in this industry, for example?

So it gives you a much more concrete starting point.

We're not giving you a load of tests and then giving you one career and go in some dystopian future where you just assigned a career, like in future army, you're defined a career at birth.

And you go, right, you're going to do that for the rest of your life.

We still give you an awful lot of support to be able to fine tune it towards what you want to do.

So after you told him Formula One, how did he actually realize logistics was in Formula One?

How do you make the transference?

He came up with that.

He was standing on the...

Because he knew about Formula One, he knew about logistics, it had just never occurred to him that actually doing logistics for Formula One is something that could be of interest to him.

Oh, so it's because he was passionate about Formula One, he already understood that industry, what was going on, how did they get cars from place to place?

But he wasn't looking at it from the logistics point of view, he was looking at it from the cars racing around the circuit and the beat backstage and all that kind of stuff.

He hadn't put together the high-end trucks.

Do you know how he figured it out?

No, we had a conversation, we were teasing through some of the ideas, so it was like, well, what about this, what about that?

And sometimes it happens the same when you're looking for your why, your core purpose.

Sometimes it's talking to somebody else, especially somebody that doesn't know anything about you, who's just cold, who's able to ask, well, what about this, well, what about that?

And it sparks those links in your brain that you just don't go down yourself.

Can it be as simple as your system puts out, the data shows, okay, you're good at logistics and you have an interest in Formula One.

Is it as simple as asking the question to yourself or somebody in Formula One in logistics?

Hey, I'm good at logistics.

How can I apply that?

Is there a way I can apply it?

Or better yet, how?

Because I can find a way, if there's not a way for myself to be useful.

Here's my skill.

Is there a way, how can I be, like basically ask someone the question who's in Formula One or ask somebody like you who's used to helping people figure out how is it transferable?

Or not even in Formula One, reaching out, I mean, all of these logistics companies, in this particular case, like there's a handful of logistics companies that are specifically built up around that.

So being able to get through to one of the managers in the logistics company for Ferrari, for the races, you'll be able to contact, like that division is much easier to get to than the head of experience for Ferrari, for example.

So being able to access that kind of information is a lot easier for somebody who's interested.

This is real interesting.

So what's another, what's a common one you get?

Like I'm an engineer, so I'm vested in science a lot.

Some business?

Funny enough, business entrepreneur and salesperson are ones that come up quite regularly, because people who like, even though people say they don't like sales, but people, I think, have a negative view of sales, because they see it as this kind of the age-old thing of the shady car salesman, the car dealer.

But actually, people who are good at communication, who are interested in a product and interested in a service, can be excellent salespeople, because they have the people skills, they have the verbal skills, and they have the abstract reasoning skills.

So long as they have basic understanding of numbers and understanding, well, we need to sell for X because we make Y, people, if they're interested in doing it and interested in being in business, sales comes up quite a bit.

And what do they do?

Like with the Formula One example, we have this person in logistics who's not really thrilled in the current position.

Those people with the business and entrepreneurship you mentioned, what were they doing now?

When they're thinking about business, what are they doing?

They can be any number of things.

I mean, probably about 10 years ago, 15 years ago now at this stage, the majority, I'd say, about 70% of the people who came through our doors for career guidance one-on-one in person before we had developed the CareerFit stuff were people who had gotten into tech.

They got into IT either support from a hardware point of view or from a coding point of view, because basically in the late 90s and the early 2000s, everybody was told in Ireland, basically, you should go do this because there's loads of money and loads of jobs.

So they went into it thinking, okay, I'll find something I enjoy about it.

The exact same example as you mentioned earlier, making money but really not enjoying it and not finding their passion about it.

So a lot of those people might have gotten marketing, might have gotten sales, but because they have the technical background, they might be more into the digital sales kind of thing, where they're looking at numbers because they're process driven, or they might be really stagnated because they were in sales for tech, but they really don't care about the tech, so they can get into sales in something that they actually care about, or into business development for something that they actually care about.

We had a kid recently who was studying engineering because his parents were engineers, and he was in engineering, but he really didn't...

He got it, like he clicked at it.

It made perfect sense to him, but he just...

He wasn't passionate about it.

He wasn't excited about it.

He was a real people person and really enjoyed interacting with people.

And one day while he was walking through college, he stumbled across some sales seminar.

And just for whatever reason, he went in, sat down at the back of the class, and a light bulb went off in his head, and he's going, I love sales, but actually, I want to be a salesperson, but I can sell engineering, because I understand the concepts of engineering, that a lot of engineers might not be able to speak in plain understandable English to the non-engineering idiots like me, who don't understand all of the technical stuff that's going on.

So he can bridge that gap, be an amazing salesperson dealing with customers and putting up with all of that juggling that goes on before going to the engineers who need the stuff in a precise way to be able to get that all aligned, to be able to deliver the solution.

So he is delighted at that intersection of two things that he has an aptitude for and he has an interest in, and being able to make that a rewarding career.

It reminds me too of there are people out there who they're not happy in their position, but they don't do anything, and this person took action.

He or she, they were the one that had decided, hey, I'm going to go through that door into the sales thing.

You can't just sit at home or be on the computer all the time and research stuff.

You have to take action, get out there, follow your intuition, whatever the word is.

For things to happen, right, you got to take action, whether it's go to CareerFit, download your e-book.

You got to do something, right?

Otherwise, nothing changes.

Any last words, Stephen?

Anything else you want to say?

Thanks very much for having me on.

So careerfit.com is the site for the career guidance stuff.

If you're looking to change careers, it's yournextcareer.com.

It's a free download.

And the thing that I just launched yesterday is whyyouhateyourjob.com with the top reasons why people hate their job and what they can do about it.

Hopefully, it's a little lighthearted, a little humor in there as well.

It sounds awesome.

Thanks for being on my show.

Pleasure.

Thanks for having me.