How Do I Rank My Preferences?
When multiple ideas and projects compete for our attention or when our preferences are unclear, we tend to delay decisions and action. Paired Comparisons is a quick and easy tool that helps with preference setting. And it’s available online.
How does it work? As its name implies: you take a set of multiple elements and sequentially compare each element with all the others, pair by pair. Each time an element “wins”, it scores a point. At the end of the exercise you rank your elements based on their total scores. The scientific basis for this method is the Law of Comparative Judgement. It works nicely when the information you have is mainly qualitative and fuzzy and when you need to have a quick support for your decision-making.
How much time does it take? It’s available online, so it will take you 5-10 minutes to set your preferences or priorities straight.
Where can I use it? The possibilities are endless: vacation destinations, books, restaurants, project ideas, New Year resolutions… For career transitions, Paired Comparisons can be an important self-discovery tool:
to rank your skills and talents (in general or by their importance for a particular role)
to better understand your working conditions preferences
to quickly evaluate competing job offers
last but not least, evaluate your current preferences for career pathways that you consider exploring for your career transition.
Preferences are not Priorities.
For career change pathways, it’s interesting to do the paired comparison over time to see how your preferences evolve. I say preferences on purpose: preferences become priorities only when you start working on them. Your actions are your real priorities.
Recently, we played this online Paired Comparison game with a good friend who is working on his career transition. The ranking of preferences did not yield any big surprises. The biggest surprise came when we looked at how he has been recently spending his time and saw an inverse relationship: he was spending the most of his time on the projects from the bottom of his preference list, and the least - on his top preferences.
It’s true that time spent is not a 100% reliable metric: following 80/20 Principle, a relatively small action, if well targeted and executed, can have a huge impact. Or sometimes it could be a matter of pure chance. However, if you declare that you want to move to a new company or new industry but for the past months have not taken a single step in that direction, you are either lying to yourself about your true preferences or have not removed hurdles that prevent you to act on them.
So, when you get the list of your career pathway preferences, ask yourself two questions:
Is my preference list consistent with how I have been spending my time recently?
If things have been stuck for a while on any of my top preferences, what next action can I take on each of them?
Artwork: Henri Matisse, Bowl of Apples on a Table, 1916