The experimenter

By · Published September 2014

What do we mean by this strategy?

Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills.

It can be particularly useful to experiment with career paths where most of the impact comes from the highest-performing people, such as research, politics, and entrepreneurship. This way, you can learn more about what it would take for you to make it to the top.

What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?

  • Trying areas outside of your experience will help you explore your options more quickly, which is the key priority when you don’t know much about the world of careers. In particular, it can help you discover ‘unknown unknowns’ – important considerations you didn’t even realise existed.
  • The value of testing out a path has often been an important consideration among the people we’ve coached.
  • It can help you avoid getting stuck in a narrow area and missing a path that would have been a great fit. We’re biased to consider an overly narrow range of options.

Which options are best within this strategy?

Find the options that have the highest exploration value, while also keeping your options open. See how to assess exploration value here.