Roman Krznaric: Choosing a career at The School of Life

It is a great pleasure for me to introduce the second guest contributer to the Talent blog, writer and thought leader on the subjects of social change and work, Roman Krznaric. Roman is on the teaching faculty of The School of Life in London, where he designed and teaches the course on Work. His new book, Empathy, will be published by Acumen later this year.

In my final year at university I suffered from a terrible illness: lack of imagination. When contemplating my career choices I could, like most of my peers, only think of three options - work in the City as an investment banker or management consultant, join the civil service, or become a journalist. So I followed the herd and applied for banking jobs, but was shown the door once I started talking in my interviews with more enthusiasm about my new bonsai tree collection than exchange rate fluctuations. My  heart wasn’t in it. I then took the civil service exams but my brain was deemed to be of the wrong sort to keep the nation on the straight and narrow. Finally, through forging the contents of my CV, I wangled a traineeship on a finance magazine. But when I was offered a staff post three months later I resigned, having discovered that  the job was low on meaning and far too stressful for my slow-paced nature.

Seeking adventure, I then visited my university careers service. My eyes passed over roomfulls of files for the standard professions. Eventually, in an obscure corner, I found one file labelled ‘Alternative Careers’. Yes, only one. And in that file was nothing more than a single sheet of paper, advertising a job as a porter at Sotheby’s. It was clear I would have to find my own way.

Since then I have had the privilege of following many careers, from academic to gardener, from United Nations development consultant to carpenter, from novelist to community worker. My CV is deliberately episodic, reflecting a belief that we should treat our working lives as an experiment in the art of living. During all my occupational travels, there are two things I have learned. First, that there are far more than three career alternatives, as I had assumed in my early twenties. In fact, there are thousands of possibilities, though most career advice hardly gives this impression. Second, that we will never make the right choices unless we develop self-knowledge. If you haven’t spent much time thinking about who you are, what you care about in life and what your priorities might be, then there is a good chance you’ll end up in a career that offers daily drudgery rather than a sense of purpose.

So, how can we go about the tricky business of exploring both the range of job possibilities and the inside of our heads? One option is to visit The School of Life, a new social enterprise based in a quirky shop in Bloomsbury, that offers creative instruction and inspiration on how to live wisely and well. You can take courses on topics like Love, Play, Family, Politics and – crucially – Work. The Work course (which I teach and helped to design) asks the big questions of career choice. What should be my ambitions? What does a meaningful job actually look like? What are the career possibilities that I’ve never thought about? How do I overcome my fears and develop the courage and self-confidence to go in a new direction, especially given the recession? You’ll investigate these issues through the lenses of psychology, philosophy, history, film and more. You might visit The Hub, an innovative centre for social entrepreneurship, where you’ll be given the task of inventing a small business that embodies your values and uses your talents. Or you could take a trip to a furniture workshop in the East End of London called Unto This Last and talk to a designer about whether a creative job leads to personal fulfilment.

The course ultimately aims to expand your curiosity and give you the tools to think about work in new ways, while dealing with the concrete realities of making the tough decisions about what career path to follow during an economic downturn. By the end, you should have a much clearer sense of what to pursue and how to pursue it so that you end up with the kind of work that suits not only who you are, but who you would like to be.

‘Work,’ said Mark Twain, ‘is a necessary evil to be avoided.’ I believe the opposite: that with the right approach, it is possible for work to become not only pleasurable, but also life enhancing.

You can read more from Roman at his website www.romankrznaric.com. The School of Life is offering our readers a 25% discount on its Work Course (both the six-week or weekend versions) if you sign up by the end of May here.