Daily Endeavor Blog

Daily Endeavor is a free online guide to jobs to help people figure out what they want to do next professionally. It’s the first step in the job search.

The website is a continually improving collection of job reviews that are collectively and publicly written by people who have had them. Of the three major stages job seekers pass through – What do I want to do next? Who do I know in that area? Who’s hiring now? – All the job boards, like CareerBuilder, The Ladders, and Monster, solve the third; LinkedIn and Facebook solve the second (though LinkedIn is growing to do a good job on more than that); and Daily Endeavor solves the first.

When most people are asked “What do you want to do next?” they respond with “What are my options?” They don’t want to know who’s hiring tomorrow, at least not as their first step. They want to understand the types of jobs that exist and which ones might be right for them.

This need, which was continually the headline in hundreds of client conversations at Endeavor Prep, is critical and unmet for nearly every student in business school, law school, graduate school, college, and increasingly high school. We originally thought this pain was primarily felt by students, but as the economy tanked and our average client age increased, we learned it’s also the central need for people switching types of work in their 30s and 40s, and even those starting their encore careers.

Because there’s no easy way to learn about 99% of the types of jobs that exist (e.g. Research in Strategy Management Consulting, or Co-Founder in Microinsurance), people do the best they can and fill the void with informational interviews. They try to get meetings with people they know who can explain a little bit about what they do.

Informational interviews are great, but of course have some real limitations if you want to learn about a lot of areas, especially if those areas are varied. Organizing one-on-one meetings is really time consuming for both people involved. And most of all, your potential to learn is limited by who you know.

We’re building the world’s largest set of do-it-yourself “informational interviews” online so everyone can quickly explore, vet and “follow” jobs and professional categories during their job search.

If you’re looking for a job, Daily Endeavor enables you to explore the universe of options even if you don’t know a lot of people. Our goal is to democratize access to careers — we want you to be able to learn about professions regardless of who you know.

There’s more to say and more to come. For now, go ahead and check out Daily Endeavor. It’s the first step to get you started in your next job.

Bijan Sabet highlights an interview excerpt with Jeff Bezos from 2001 over at the Academy of Achievement (another great resource for learning about careers). When thinking about the big professional forks in the road — and they all feel big — Bezos worked to look through the long lens. It came down this: minimize regrets.

So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.”…So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.”

Great advice for not only what we choose to do next, but also how we choose to do it.

Whether it’s a job search with multiple potential directions, or you’re thinking about taking the plunge as a founder in a startup, what door, if left unopened, will bum you out? If you’re already doing what you want to be doing, is there something in how you’re going about it that may leave you with regret?

New interview questions coming your way soon

• Infographic: What Kind of Worker Are You? by Cliff Kuang — Joey Roth‘s take, distilled down to how hard you work and how much you talk. (Fast Company Design)

• Colleges Not Training Students for Careers that Are Growing by Scott Jaschik — “Employability” gets a boost from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. (USAToday)

• 6 Steps to a New Career by Dimitri A.C. Ly — Highlights the importance and difficulty of exploring options that interest you during the job search. (Mint Blog)

There’s a great introduction to microfinance, in this case created by Unitus. At 14:00 minutes in length you’ll need to sit down to watch it, but it’s shorter than a TED talk and it does a very good job at explaining the why, what and how of microfinance — how it provides the poor basic access to the type of economic system people enjoy in more developed countries (e.g. access to small loans to make improvements).

Microfinance is currently the 4th most requested area on Daily Endeavor. The top roles that people want to learn about most are:

1. Business Development in Microinsurance
2. CFO in Microfinance Fund Transfers & Remittances
3. Client Management in Microfinance Consulting

In the video there’s a clear narrative throughout interspersed with examples from India and Mexico, and short interviews with:

• Mike Murray and Geoff Davis at Unitus
• Lorene Arey, The Clara Fund
• Marisa Otero, Accion International
• Stewart Alsop, Alsop Louie Partners
• Steven Funk, Grand Marais Investments
• Elizabeth Funk, CML Global Capital
• Chris Eyre, Legacy Venture
• Vikram Akula, S.K.S.
• Nancy and Clair Jenkins, participants
• Warner Woodworth, BYU and
• Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank

If you’re thinking about considering work in alleviating poverty, this video is well worth your time.

And if you can help describe Microinsurance to those who want to learn more about it, that would rock:

Tens of thousands of people in the US dream of going into education. Hundreds of thousands want to see the education system improve. After this movie, I hope, that number will be in the millions.

On Daily Endeavor, Education is the #1 most requested area to learn more about. The top most requested job is currently Speech Pathology in Public Kindergarten.

Who do you know that can help the people dreaming about becoming a speech pathologist learn more about it?