Choosing a Career Path Requires Students to Build Tolerance for Ambiguity
Ask a teenager or young adult what they want to do for a career, and you’ll often get a shrug in return. It’s a legitimately difficult question to answer. Technology is changing what jobs are viable. Politics and regulation are reshaping industries. Climate change is making some career paths riskier and others more in-demand than they were even a few years ago.
Most career advice assumes that the goal is to find the “right” answer — the right major, the right field and the right five-year plan. But economies and job markets are constantly changing, and the goal should instead be making sound decisions without having all the information. Psychologists call this “tolerance for ambiguity.” Studies on career decision-making have found that people who struggle to make tough decisions aren’t lacking information but rather certainty. And in real life, certainty is rarely a given.
How to help young adults get comfortable with uncertainty
Tolerance for ambiguity is a skill not an innate quality, which means it can be learned through practice. Here are a few ways to foster this mindset:
Let your teen or young adult make a real, reversible choice: Give them agency over low stakes things like which classes or extracurricular activities to commit to in the next year.
After they choose, reflect on the decision: Ask them questions like “What made your decision hard?” “What information did you wish you had?” “What would you do differently next time?”
Allow them to fail (safely): If the choices they’ve made don’t work out, help them absorb the fallout. A class that’s the wrong fit or a club they don’t like isn’t a waste of time. Each experience provides information that can help them make different choices in the future.
How tolerance for ambiguity applies when making career decisions
The goal of this practice is to help students feel comfortable making big decisions — such as which college program to attend, major to choose or career path to pursue — without having total clarity. This frames questions differently:
“What if I make the wrong choice?” becomes “Why is this a reasonable choice for me right now?”
“Is this what I want to do forever?” becomes “What can I learn from this that I can use no matter what comes next?”
“How do I know I’m ready to decide?” becomes “Is there any information that could change my answer right now, and is it worth waiting for?”
Some unknowns are worth chasing down, but many aren’t. Helping teens and young adults get comfortable choosing without total clarity matters more than helping them eliminate uncertainty first. By practicing tolerance for ambiguity in small moments, families and caregivers can help their students build their decision-making muscles so they’re ready when the big ones arrive.
