When Jumping Out of the Frying Pan, Avoid Landing in the Fire

I first entered the career planning field in the early 1990s during another recession. I was in graduate school studying to be a librarian and was hired to run a job information center in a public library. Unemployment was quite high at the time and we were very busy. One thing that sticks with me to this day were those clients who had lost their jobs and decided to retrain for new careers because their former ones held little promise for recovery. Unfortunately, the careers they chose to retrain for held little promise either. These clients had literally gone from one bad situation to another.

To avoid ending up in a field that had little to offer them, they could have done some research. The Occupational Outlook Handbook, as the name implies, looks at an occupation's potential for future growth. Of course, since these are only predictions, they can change, but it's better than investing time, money and energy into training that definitely won't pay off.

More: Exploring Occupations