Do you place more faith in information that includes a statistic? Ninety-nine percent of Americans do. Would you be more inclined to buy a product with a high customer-satisfaction rating than one with no ratings? Seventy-eight percent of consumers would. Do you think I’m making up these numbers? I one-hundred-percent am.
Like most people (how many?), I love statistics – until I don’t. I love them when they support my argument or when they tell me to do something I wanted to do anyway. But the love affair falters when the numbers challenge beliefs I hold dear. And things really go south if I sense the number was arrived at by sloppy processes. Then I feel deceived and rebellious, prone to take the alternate route just to be contrary.
I don’t think I’m different from most people (can we say 85 percent?) in this love-hate relationship. I couldn’t speak to the accuracy of numbers used in other fields, but seeing how statistics are abused in the world of job search gives me a healthy skepticism overall.
Just to give you a short list of questionable statistics or processes that pop up in my field: Salary surveys with too few participants to give a true range; job seeker surveys that “prove” the market is unresponsive without noting the methods or intensity of each person’s search; studies claiming to demonstrate hiring trends by measuring online ads — without accounting for a percentage of false ads or for the fields that abstain from using this medium for staffing.
I could go on almost indefinitely (perhaps 17.5 years) but the point is simple: Career decisions are too important to base on faulty data.
This issue came to mind when I was on-air during a call-in program on Minnesota Public Radio late in November. When the conversation turned to salary surveys, I said something like “I don’t trust any numbers I didn’t gather myself.” At which point host Kerri Miller laughed and noted that that approach wouldn’t fly in her line of work.
Of course she’s right; news gathering isn’t exactly a do-it-yourself project. Journalists can’t make the news before reporting it. Nor can job seekers create their own surveys and statistics before moving forward on their career decisions.
Or can they?
If job seekers remember that the big economic picture doesn’t matter as much as the localized jobs situation, then they’ll be halfway (45 percent?) to recognizing the solution: Talk with people directly linked to the situation you’re trying to analyze and use their responses to guide your decisions.
Here’s how that might look. Suppose you’ve read national or state studies that say your field will decline over the next 20 years and that employment will lag. That would normally be an indication to stay away. But what if you want to work only 10 more years, you like your field, and changing careers at this stage would negatively impact your overall earnings and career trajectory?
This is a situation where more information could matter. To gather your own statistics in this case would mean talking to people locally who are closely tied to the field. Your research might mirror the statistics you’ve already seen but then again, you might be surprised.
For example, you might discover that the worst part of the predicted decline is likely to happen later in the 20-year cycle — long after you will have left the field. Or, perhaps the numbers you’ve seen are heavily influenced by activity in a part of the state you’re not planning to work in. You might even discover that a local company is aware of the dire predictions and is already buying out its weaker competitors.
In each of these circumstances, conducting your own research is the key to uncovering the information you need to make a better decision. And while your research isn’t likely to be statistically viable for use by others, it will be highly relevant to your personal situation. That’s because you will have asked the questions that matter the most to you.
This process of research is already familiar to job seekers who have conducted informational interviews to learn more about specific fields of work. To prepare for conversations with department managers, members of professional associations, instructors, consultants or others with direct knowledge of the field, start by reviewing relevant surveys and statistics. Then, ask your sources for their take on this data, and their advice for your career path.
The beauty of this method is two-fold: Not only will you gain a better perspective on the numbers you’re seeing, but you’ll create connections that might be helpful later in your search — I’m pretty certain that 97 percent of job search strategists would agree.
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