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As the new year approaches, many folks begin to think about New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the coming year. Sometimes these goals involve your job, your health habits, or other personal development topics.

Jeremiah Owyang published a list of Six Career Tips for people in the corporate world. One of the most interesting was this one:

Reverse engineer the job you want
Another useful tip is to reverse engineer the position that you desire to be in. Earlier in my career, I aspired to be a web manager, so I took job descriptions of web strategists and looked at all the skills and experiences needed. I printed out the job description (circled the salary) and taped it to my bathroom mirror, I saw it every morning and night, a double dose of self-reflection. Over time, you start to piece together the projects, programs, and apply new skills to learn how to do this. With time and perseverance, your resume will catch up to where you want to go.

Another tip that resonated with me was his perspective on education. Quite a few of the people that I have managed and trained in the past have been young people, just going off to college, and they have asked me about the value of education and what they should study in order to get a “good” job.

My advice often conflicts with what they have heard from parents and guidance counselors. In my own experience those guidance counselors were dead wrong and the whole profession should be outlawed. An education is important, depending on what field you are looking to go into. Most of the time I recommend that you go to college and study something that you are passionate about, or at least very interested in. I’ll let Jeremiah cover the rest:

Education matters, but not as much as you thought
For very specialized jobs, where in school training is essential (law, medicine, sometimes programming) this bullet doesn’t apply to you. More and more executives I meet have degrees in something they didn’t study in school for. For most jobs, they hire you because of what you can do for them, not what school you went to. There’s a reason why education falls to the bottom of the resume, and the ‘value statement’ is at the top, quickly followed by real world experience. Don’t get me wrong, education is very important, a bachelor degree is really expected in today’s workplace, but I often lean on the broad, theoretical knowledge I gained as a primer (or glossary) for me to dive in deeper in the business world.

The future of work is changing, schools are not preparing children for it.It is increasingly up to you to help and educate yourself.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6z3co8. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen