Why too many career options can be a bad thing, and how Talismatic can help

 

If you, like any earnest educator, are keeping abreast of US jobs data and employment-related news, you’ll be pleased to know that the US job market is going strong and is projected to grow further. Great news, right? Well, not exactly. An abundance of employment opportunities may not directly be a problem per se, but choosing the right career option from an expanding pool of jobs poses a challenge for both students and career guidance teams.

 

Although students are more directly impacted by these decisions, educators also need to worry about ensuring their students’ career success; after all student career success is among the key effectiveness predictors in higher education. Now, you might be wondering ‘What downside can a growing job market have?’ Here’s the answer:

 

Overcoming the paradox of choice

Too many options in any context can be detrimental to quick and effective decision-making. This is true even if the decision is regarding something as inconsequential as choosing a pair of socks from multiple options. This is because people don’t want to make the wrong choice and pay for it later.

 

And they only get more cautious when it’s about long-term and impactful decisions like choosing the right career. Regardless of the growing availability of jobs, the fact remains that depending on the combination of a student’s skills, qualifications, and preferences, only a few jobs among thousands are really suitable for him. However, the challenge is to analyze the multitude of available jobs and filter the number of alternatives to a manageable number.

 

Once the number of alternatives is minimized, students, guided by their career guidance teams, can make way more confident decisions and choose the jobs they want to apply for. However, until recently, there were no means for students and educators to analyze the messy cornucopia of US job data to plan careers reliably. But now, through educational data mining and labor market analytics, students can hurdle this paradox of choice.

 

Narrowing down options with Talismatic

Talismatic’s labor market analytics-based application for students analyzes the entire body of US jobs data to filter out job roles that a student is most perfectly suited for, based on their skills and preferences. Talismatic gives students a highly customized list of jobs, enabling them to easily compare and evaluate their top options. By using the information provided by the tool and combining it with the experience of the career services team, students can decide upon their career paths with certainty.

 

Talismatic’s career exploration tool enables students to avoid the paradox of choice through the detailed analysis of US jobs data and automated discovery of perfectly tailored employment opportunities. So, if you want to make the career exploration puzzle less confusing for yourself and your students, try Talismatic today!