Too much information?

Following on from my recent obsession with decision making, I've shifted a bit now to look at the bit before the decision - the bit where we try to make sense of all the information that we know.

The information we get about careers is huge, complex and quite daunting when you stop to think about it. We are fed information about different jobs, occupations, industries, and the economy at large from all different quarters a hundred times a day. Each time we contact a call centre, buy stamps from the post office or book an appointment with our GP we are feeding, confusing and expanding our knowledge of the world of work. So how do we start to make sense of it all?

We've developed quite a few clever tricks to help us cope. Some of them useful, and some of them perhaps less so.

We have developed a few unconscious strategies for dealing with the sheer volume of information. One strategy is  to focus in on a subset of occupations, making  a swift, ill-informed decision to look at jobs in, say, the media and then starting to do some more in depth research to decide between TV production and advertising. Alternatively we go for a single factor, and research that widely, for example, jobs with high starting salaries which could lead us to a choice between law and banking. We can become overwhelmed with choices, and as information increases, our awareness goes down. When the information goes beyond what we can manage we will restrict the processing that we do, to avoid cognitive stress.

We don’t always evaluate the information that we get with the cold, critical eye of an MI5 agent. ‘Hot’ information is much more appealing to us than ‘cold’ information. This is traditionally something that has been particularly associated with people from working class backgrounds, but it now seems clear that this effect is shown across all groups. Hot information is stuff you hear from people you know. Cold information comes from more formal sources such as government websites and career books. In career terms, we’re much more likely to base our view of how easy it is to make a success of a new business venture based on Uncle Bob’s thriving business, than on BIS’s website which states that 90% of new businesses fold within two years.

Occupational information tends to be gleaned from different sources, which will often provide different information, presented in different ways. When comparing occupations (or indeed other options), therefore you will often not have comparable information. You may, for example, know the starting salaries for all occupations you’re looking into, but only the levels of autonomy for one, and the typical hours worked for another. Factors which you can compare directly are given more weight in your mental calculations than others, regardless of how important the factors are to you. So in this case, even though autonomy might be the single most important factor to you, the conclusions you would draw from your research would be based principally on the starting salaries, because that is the one that you can compare directly.

I'm sure there are lots of other heuristics and short cuts that we take and I'll report back as I find out more. I think this is all really useful for us as coaches to know. The more that we understand about the way our minds work, the more we can work with our clients to help them to identify what information they should highlight and what to play down.