This page summarises a few pivotal articles, namely:
How to personalise your career path with first principles thinking
How to pick a career (that actually fits you)
How high-achieving students think about their careers
How you can have a fulfilling career
I would recommend reading all of these, but if not, here's a summary/my take:
Let's first debunk the myth that your life is a predetermined path. It used to be that you’d go to university and study something, then get a career in that field, and then spend the next 40 years working in that field. Perhaps you would have a few promotions along the way, but then you would eventually retire. Once you chose your tunnel as a teenager, you were stuck in it.
Today, the career landscape isn’t made up of tunnels like this. It's complex and rapidly changing. Doctors are becoming management consultants. Olympic medallists are highly sought after at Harvard business school. Entrepreneurs are running for parliament.
The first is the pigeonhole worrier: Students who are worried about pigeonholing themselves in a particular function or industry.
The second is the laser-focused: Students who fully commit to a particular function or industry and are focused on building expertise in this field.
Theres also a less prominent third category:
The T-shaped learner: Students who build cross-functional perspective and skills by experimenting in a variety of functions and industries.
So starting with the pigeonhole worrier,
There’s still a tendency to see your life as a tunnel that requires a lifelong commitment. This can foster a lot of anxiety when you make decisions such as internship and job choices. Students worry that they are pigeon-holing themselves into an industry just because they are interning in a certain field. You worry that you’ll lose optionality. In reality, it takes far more than one internship to risk pigeon-holing yourself.
Students and young professionals can easily avoid pigeonholing by spinning their experience into a compelling story that focuses on the transferable skills they’ve developed.
If you have a part-time job as a supermarket bag-packer, you don’t need to worry about being pigeonholed in bag-packing. Instead, you can network for positions that require strong soft skills (e.g. sales, customer success, etc.) and focus on your excellent customer service experience.