I think I’d expect you to be able to get quite a bit of information on roles without having to actually do them full time. I’d expect, for example, the level of information you get from doing some sales at a startup to give you pretty good information about whether you like sales. That’s definitely not going to be fully generalisable—sales for a startup will look different than for an established company, and things like the culture of the company you work for will make a huge difference. But taking a sales job to try it out will similarly not be fully generalisable.
One way of thinking about how to learn about different roles is to try to build a ladder of cheap tests—starting with things like reading a bit about a role, then trying to talk to people doing that role, then perhaps doing a short project. Ways of testing things that don’t go all the way to getting a role could include: doing a course, volunteering for a charity (there are usually ways of finding charities in your local area looking for volunteers, along the lines of this one for Oxford) or doing an internship (sometimes these are pretty short, so you might be able to take a couple of weeks holiday from work to do one).
Thank you for your response! My concern is that cheap tests that only last a few weeks or months, will not provide accurate information about how good one is at a role. I’ve been a software engineer almost two years now. If I were to have only worked as a software engineer for six months and stopped and reflected on whether I had the potential to get very good at the role, I might have concluded that I had little potential based on my performance. But now on month 19, I think my prospects are quite good. There was a really long onboarding and skill-building period that had to be done before I could really start contributing and determining how good I could get. While there might be shorter onboarding periods in other jobs that are more oriented around soft skills—e.g. sales, consulting, marketing, etc., I imagine it will still take a long time to be sufficiently onboarded to be able to assess one’s potential.
However, maybe there is a happy middle ground between the extremes of working on a role for 2 years and doing a small project for a few months. I think the charity option is interesting—one could work for a charity in a role for a year or more to see if they’d be good at the skills involved in the role. Probably a lot of roles—e.g. sales, marketing, accounting can be tested out this way. But some roles like product management seem to be particularly hard to find in the volunteering space. I’ve scoured Google for “volunteer product management” positions and only found 3 that seemed to be open to applications. I interviewed for one of the three and it turned out be more of a project management role, where the volunteer had little agency/ownership.
That said, maybe it’s the case that the vast majority of skills can be tested in volunteer roles. While it may be hard to find a volunteer product management position, it probably would be pretty feasible for a capable person to find roles that involved customer research, project management, web/mobile analytics, marketing, etc. at volunteer orgs, so one could potentially test out all the component skills used in product management separately. In practice though, testing all these skills might be very difficult.
I think I’d expect you to be able to get quite a bit of information on roles without having to actually do them full time. I’d expect, for example, the level of information you get from doing some sales at a startup to give you pretty good information about whether you like sales. That’s definitely not going to be fully generalisable—sales for a startup will look different than for an established company, and things like the culture of the company you work for will make a huge difference. But taking a sales job to try it out will similarly not be fully generalisable.
One way of thinking about how to learn about different roles is to try to build a ladder of cheap tests—starting with things like reading a bit about a role, then trying to talk to people doing that role, then perhaps doing a short project. Ways of testing things that don’t go all the way to getting a role could include: doing a course, volunteering for a charity (there are usually ways of finding charities in your local area looking for volunteers, along the lines of this one for Oxford) or doing an internship (sometimes these are pretty short, so you might be able to take a couple of weeks holiday from work to do one).
Thank you for your response! My concern is that cheap tests that only last a few weeks or months, will not provide accurate information about how good one is at a role. I’ve been a software engineer almost two years now. If I were to have only worked as a software engineer for six months and stopped and reflected on whether I had the potential to get very good at the role, I might have concluded that I had little potential based on my performance. But now on month 19, I think my prospects are quite good. There was a really long onboarding and skill-building period that had to be done before I could really start contributing and determining how good I could get. While there might be shorter onboarding periods in other jobs that are more oriented around soft skills—e.g. sales, consulting, marketing, etc., I imagine it will still take a long time to be sufficiently onboarded to be able to assess one’s potential.
However, maybe there is a happy middle ground between the extremes of working on a role for 2 years and doing a small project for a few months. I think the charity option is interesting—one could work for a charity in a role for a year or more to see if they’d be good at the skills involved in the role. Probably a lot of roles—e.g. sales, marketing, accounting can be tested out this way. But some roles like product management seem to be particularly hard to find in the volunteering space. I’ve scoured Google for “volunteer product management” positions and only found 3 that seemed to be open to applications. I interviewed for one of the three and it turned out be more of a project management role, where the volunteer had little agency/ownership.
That said, maybe it’s the case that the vast majority of skills can be tested in volunteer roles. While it may be hard to find a volunteer product management position, it probably would be pretty feasible for a capable person to find roles that involved customer research, project management, web/mobile analytics, marketing, etc. at volunteer orgs, so one could potentially test out all the component skills used in product management separately. In practice though, testing all these skills might be very difficult.
Edit: Found the right link for ladder of cheap tests lower down!