People are poor at predicting what will suit them at work

Ask someone to imagine themselves in a job they are considering and they will produce a scene. Usually it is a good scene, and usually it is the wrong one. It tends to contain the moments the occupation is known for — the surgery, the courtroom, the launch — and to omit the material the day is actually made of, which is documentation, waiting, negotiation with people who disagree, and repetition.

This is not a failure of imagination in any individual. It is a predictable feature of how people forecast their own future feelings (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005), and it has consequences for career decisions that are worth stating plainly.

Three ways the forecast goes wrong

The peak stands in for the whole. When people imagine a role, they retrieve its most vivid features. Vividness and frequency are not the same. A defining moment that occurs twice a year does not describe what Tuesday feels like.

The bad parts are underweighted because they are boring. The tedious parts of an occupation are, by construction, not memorable, so they are hard to summon when imagining. They are however most of the hours.

Adaptation is ignored in both directions. People systematically expect good changes to feel good for longer than they do, and bad changes to feel bad for longer than they do. Applied to careers, this means the salary increase is overvalued in advance and the difficult first year is overfeared.

What this changes about how to gather information

If the forecast is unreliable, the remedy is not to think harder. It is to change what information goes into the forecast in the first place.

• Ask people in the occupation what they did yesterday, hour by hour, rather than what they like about the job. The first question is answerable; the second produces a rehearsed answer.
• Ask what the worst part is and how often it occurs. Frequency is the information the imagination omits.
• Ask what the first two years were like, separately from what the tenth year is like. Most people leave an occupation during the first two.
• Prefer a day spent watching the work to an hour spent discussing it.

Where measurement helps and where it does not

This is one of the places where an instrument genuinely adds something the person cannot supply from introspection. A student's own report of their interests is a forecast, with all the weaknesses above. A measured aptitude profile is not a forecast; it is a record of how they performed on defined tasks, compared with others. It is a different kind of evidence, and combining the two is more informative than either alone.

What measurement cannot do is tell someone how a job will feel. No inventory contains that information, because it depends on the particular workplace, the particular people, and the particular decade. Anyone offering an instrument that promises to identify a person's calling is selling a forecast dressed as a measurement.

Instruments are good at describing how a person performs and what they report preferring. They are not good at predicting satisfaction, and honest ones do not claim to be.

The modest conclusion

The point is not that people cannot choose well. It is that choosing well requires importing information from outside one's own imagination — from measurement, from people doing the work, from watching it happen — because the imagination alone has a systematic bias and knowing about the bias does not remove it.