Vocational Creativity #2: If You’re Thinking About Social Work, Check Out These 5 Careers First - Ep. 69

Ryan: Aloha folks, and welcome back to degree free. We are your host, Ryan and Hannah Maruyama.

On this podcast, we share fundamentals we've discovered and the mistakes we've made while self-educating getting work, building businesses and making money. We'll tell you how to make it happen. No degree needed.

Hannah: Welcome back. Welcome back everybody to the podcast. We as always are happy to have you here with us, and if you wanna get.

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So you don't miss it.

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. And let's get into today's episode today. We are going to be doing the first in a series, on what we call vocational creativity. And we've made an episode already kind of explaining what vocational creativity is in depth and why we think it's important and why, if we all practice it a little bit more, we be able to expand what we thought was possible as far as what we could do for work

And so we'll put the first episode, the explainer episode in the show notes for everybody, that'll be at degree free.co/podcast. And you can just look up vocational creativity there for a quick breakdown if you don't wanna go back and listen to that real fast. Vocational creativity, it's kind of, a superpower.

Hannah: Yeah, it really is

Ryan: in identifying different vocations work, jobs, whatever that you can do throughout our time of doing this, talking to people, coaching people, we found that one of the most limiting things for people in their careers is just not knowing what's out there.

Hannah: And it's hard to, because there's so many things, but people don't even know how to figure out what those things are because we're taught such a narrow menu of career options in school.

Ryan: Exactly. And so just quickly try to do this in 30 seconds or less. Well, I'm not gonna do it. I've tried to do this in two minutes or less.

Hannah: Okay.

Ryan: And. Whenever we ask people think back to like being a kid or being a teenager. What do you wanna do? There's a good chance that there's gonna be same 10 to 20 jobs that they say, or what kind of jobs are out there even is a better question.

And it's gonna be around the same amount of jobs. It's gonna be doctor, lawyer, teacher, cop, fireman, that

Hannah: and that's honestly, a lot of times people stop out there.

Ryan: Right, but I mean, there's social work.

Hannah: That's usually when they learn a little bit later. Yeah.

Ryan: You know, maybe

Hannah: Pilot sometimes.

Ryan: Yeah. Pilot, cowboy.

Hannah: Oh yeah. Cowboy

Ryan: those type of things

Hannah: rockstar

Ryan: Yeah rockstar YouTube star now

Hannah: YouTube star now, right? Yeah. That one got added.

Ryan: And, and what we're trying to do with vocational creativity is just trying to expand that horizon. Basically just kind of expand that viewpoint. If that makes sense, like expand on what's possible. So instead of it being like, if you're thinking about being in the airline industry and you wanna work around planes instead of thinking, oh, you only can be a pilot, maybe you'll. Would rather be a flight attendant. Maybe you would rather be a baggage thrower.

Maybe you'd rather work air traffic control. Maybe,

Hannah: maybe you wanna be a buyer for planes.

Ryan: Buyer, maybe like to be a mechanic. There's so many other careers involved with that. And if we just expand our horizon a little bit more, it really opens up. What else is out there in the world.

Hannah: Yeah. And once you know what's out there, that's the first step. You can't do what you don't know exists.

Ryan: Exactly.

Hannah: And that's one of the biggest hurdles I think for people that are trying to figure out what they wanna do for work, whether it's first career choice or they're going back again now. And a lot of us are taught. There's only one way to do things and conveniently for colleges, a lot of the times it's a one way paywall. It's a one way street in and you have to pay them $200 before you pass go.

Ryan: It reminds me a lot of vocabulary and there's that saying, I don't know who said it. Or I'm gonna get this, I'm gonna mess this up. Somebody correct me. [email protected] if you know what I'm talking about, and if I find it, I'll put in the show notes for everybody, but there's that saying, like, your thoughts are limited to your words basically, and, or your thoughts are limited to your vocabulary.

Hannah: Yeah.

Ryan: And the amount of words that you,

Hannah: that, you know,

Ryan: know and it's kind of similar in that vein.

Hannah: Yeah. Like if you don't know the titles of these jobs, or you don't know that they even exist, how are you supposed to know.

Ryan: How are you supposed to aspire to them?

Hannah: Right.

Ryan: How are you supposed to

Hannah: even find them

Ryan: Exactly. How are you supposed to be like, yeah, that's what I wanted to do if you don't know that they exist.

So anyway, that was way more than two minutes. Go back and listen to the episode and all the future episodes about vocational creativity.

Hannah: Yeah. This is gonna be good. This is gonna be good. I think people are gonna like this series a lot.

Ryan: So for the first episode, we are gonna be talking about social work.

And so if you're thinking about social work, possibly checking out these careers first, and that's not, a diss on social work or the people that work in that field or anything like that, it's just a field that we see a lot. A lot of people ask this very question I'm thinking about going into social work, but what else can I do?

Like literally that's the question that we get asked.

Hannah: Yep.

And this is the question, the fields that this gets asked about the most, the genres of work that this gets asked about the most are gonna be teaching, social work and medicine, because a lot of, women buy more college degrees than men.

So, I personally believe, that women are targeted and taught to just go ahead and buy these degrees. And they're told this is the only way for you to work anywhere near what this is, and this is your passion and you have to buy a degree and this is the only path. They do that because that's a really good way to sell product, right?

If I was trying to sell something, that seems pretty solid. So I think that,that. Where all this curiosity comes from, but we do get this question a lot. This one is one of the most common, like I'm going into social work. What else can I do? What else can I do other than get a degree in social work and then go work in social work.

So, we've compiled a list.

Ryan: So one of the things with this whole vocational creativity thing, and when people ask these types of questions that we have to do is we have to break down, what are you really asking? I'm thinking about going into social work. Are there any other alternatives to it?

That's the question. That's a really, really, really broad question.

Hannah: Super.

Ryan: So the way that we've chosen to focus on, like the points that we've chosen to focus on are gonna be on average, making more money than the median salary of a social worker

Hannah: With a graduate degree, I found the ones that we found for this.

So this is the median salary of a social worker in the us is 48k with a graduate degree. That is not a bachelor's, which most of them just have a bachelor's most of 'em just have a bachelor's degree and have a worse outcome. So what we're doing here is these jobs make more than that.

Ryan: So not only that, the second thing that we're gonna be talking about is we're just making an assumption that if you're thinking about social work, you wanna help people.

Hannah: Yep. And you wanna work with people.

Ryan: These are two massive assumptions that we're not sure it's gonna vary for everybody.

Hannah: Yeah. We have to start somewhere.

Ryan: Right. But these are the two assumptions that we've made, for this, vocational creativity exercise, yeah. And. Just because we have, these ideas here doesn't mean we are limited to this. I mean,it's infinite, so we have five ideas here and. Yeah, let's talk about 'them.

Hannah: Yeah. So number one on this list is probably the closest, and that's gonna be a mediator, like a legal mediator. This is a job that I don't think a lot of people know exists. The reason. I don't think a lot of people know it exists is because, I don't actually know why people don't know why it exists, but I didn't know it existed until I was probably in my mid twenties.

And I ran across someone who was a mediator. And what she was doing was she was actually working as a case manager, a social worker, case manager before that. And she was working in, family. I can't remember exactly like she was working with families that were going through like domestic violence situations.

And so she started working as a case manager, and so she was working as a case manager and one of the lawyers on one of the sides that she was working with noticed that she was really good at working with the people. And so he asked her if she'd be interested in joining their firm as a mediator. And so that's actually how she became a mediator. And she was actually making, she was actually making 75kas a mediator, which was quite a bit more than she had been making as a case manager. And she really liked it. She was, it was really interesting listening to her, explain Sitting down and just how she goes about easing situations and getting people to resolve problems.

And it was really cool and she's, she was really happy with her work. Like still worked with kids, still worked with families, still resolves complex family issues and was able to get down to the nitty gritty and actually help people figure out their problems. So super cool. Super cool job. That to me, seemed like a direct transition from her original job.

Ryan: Yeah. And I'm not sure if we said it already, but the median salary for mediators is $49,000 a year.

Hannah: Yeah. Butuh, this Reddit thread that I attached here, is somebody who is a mediator and explains. Ike a day in the life, a viewpoint and other people commented on it as well. And it seems like a lot of them make more crowdsource information given it's Reddit, but it seems like a lot of them make more than 49.

Ryan: So this is one of the things that we wanted to do for this episode, because we talk about it a lot and we talk about Reddit and we talk about like, Finding

Hannah: context.

Ryan: Yeah. Or just information crowdsource information and, Quora similar thing. And so for each one of these things, we are gonna have a Reddit thread.

Hannah: If it exists, we'll find it.

Ryan: Link to everything in the show notes for you guys degreefree.co/podcast. And you can find it there, but yeah, in this Reddit thread. And so once again, we can't fact check people, but. It is good we think to be able to see what other people do and the amount of money they make.

And a lot of times it could be totally fake totally.

Hannah: Yeah.

They could be making it up,

Ryan: but there's something to a pseudonym on the internet, there's whatever. It's throw away account 2 6, 9, 4, 2 0. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like what the hell? Yeah. But this person can say oh, I make 75k as a, as mediator doing this.

Yada yada yada.

The thing with mediator is that in some states it does, they do require a license and some states don't.

Hannah: Yes, but none of them require a college degree. You can become a mediator, a licensed mediator without a college degree, even in the states that require a licensure.

Ryan: Right.

And that's the case with all of these jobs.

All of these jobs do not require college degrees.

Hannah: Yeah. That's partially why we pick these two is because these are all things that you can do without buying a degree at all.

Ryan: Yeah. Mediator, depending on the type of mediation that you do, this is, it can be very similar to social work, but social work is also just going back to social work.

Social work is kind of going back to defining our terms, it's very wide ranging.

Hannah: Yeah. That's another thing I've noticed about people that, that say to a lot of people that ask this question, like, what can I do instead of social work? A lot of times they're currently in school or they're about to start college, right? So they don't actually know what social workers do.

And it's just a really broad and they don't even understand how broad it is. Cuz a lot of them get into, they start to applying to jobs and then they realize it's not, they're not working with people. They're working in an admin role, they're working in an office doing paperwork and that's what they do.

And I think a lot of them, if they had known that was their job, they might have picked something else.

Ryan: Or if you, or the exact opposite, if you like to do paperwork, but you want to know that the paperwork that you're filing is going towards a good cause. And you're going towards helping somebody on the other side of that, for whatever it is that you are doing.

Yeah. Then maybe you'd maybe you would wanna do that. Maybe you don't want us to talk to people. Yeah. And now this is a viable route for you.

Hannah: Right. But now you don't have to buy a degree to do it. Now that opens a whole other host of things you could do. You don't have to do it in this context.

Ryan: I'm more talking about yeah. I'm more talking about just defining what social work is.

Hannah: Yeah. It's hard cuz so it's so broad.

Ryan: And there's a massive spectrum from working back of the office. Back of the house, never just filing paperwork, permits, whatever it is that you're doing.

Hannah: Yeah. Just keeping an off and running

Ryan: permits or whatever, and then being a crisis manager.

Hannah: Right. And on the street.

Ryan: Right, exactly. Being out in the field and whatever, like doing that, those are so much between that and that's all social work, but we've gotta go some sort of direction with this. So the second career job. Is gonna be funeral director and the median salary for funeral director is 58k a year. 58,000 a year.

Hannah: Yep. I actually have a story about this one too. This was a long time ago, but I was on a podcast with these two really cool chicks that were morticians actually, which is another interesting job that you don't always need a degree for. That's a whole, that's a whole another thing though.

That's more of like a science.

Ryan: I remember this. If we can find that podcast, we'll link to it in the show notes for everybody.

And, I think I remember two girl dead girls talking, something like that.

Hannah: Yes. Two dead girls talking. Super cool chicks.

Ryan: And so. We'll link to it in the show notes it's completely not relevant to what we do now. Yeah. But if you guys wanted to figure out what we did in our previous life and what we did for our previous business

Hannah: Yeah. When we owned a tattoo shop

Ryan: Yeah. You can go ahead and listen to that.

Hannah: Yeah, but they were super, they were super cool.

And they were talking about the fact that, we did talk about, college actually at one point in the podcast and their take on it was pretty interesting too. But they talked about how much they actually enjoyed their work and how they worked. They were actually working at a trade school too, so they were training.

They were doing like hands on. Hands on training for people. But they also mentioned the fact that, they thought their work, they felt really fulfilled in their work and they really liked it because death is a hard thing, right? Death is a hard, it's a hard thing. It's a final thing. And it's a common experience.

Everyone has to will, will encounter it at some point, and the people who are there working alongside you as you go through that can make a real impact on your experience with someone's death. Actually that's mirrored in Reddit, whicha lot of the people in this Reddit thread that it's linked below, that's gonna be linked in the show notes about this.

They say the same thing. The fact that they're able to facilitate, epeace and calm and make sure that these people have some, ome sort of closure and organization to a really stressful time. It gives them a lot of, gives them a lot of joy and that's super cool.

A college degree is not a requirement though you may need specified training depending on who's hiring you. It seemed like when I looked into this, a lot of places will train you.

Ryan: And I had a friend that was a funeral director, and that was once again in a different life. And we were both working a job.

And his previous job was a funeral director, and the, as far as the training goes, it, I really depends also on what type of funeral home it is because, and I think the biggest difference with most things is big or small. Big or small. So if you're just running like. A very small funeral home that maybe does a funeral, maybe one a week.

Maybe that's a lot. I don't know, but you know what I mean, one a month or something like that? That's different. I mean, we're probably not making $58,000 if you're making's one a month.

Hannah: Probably not,

Ryan: but you know what I'm saying? Like the training is gonna be different.

Hannah: Versus you're coordinating five a day.

Ryan: Right? Exactly. I'm thinking of some bigger funeral homes that I've seen.

Hannah: And that's that a lot of work.

Ryan: Right. And there's like three different venues. In this one funeral,

Hannah: Oh, I didn't think about that

Ryan: funeral home. And then they have like a two o'clock and they try to stagger 'em because parking, at least from the ones that I'm thinking of.

And so like they have a two o'clock, they got a 12 o'clock and they got a five.

Hannah: Yeah. And then they're all gonna be different too. Right. You might have a burial versus an internment of ashes versus a

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. But then that's all different because that's, depending on, you're absolutely right.

Hannah: Yeah. Interesting stuff though. 'Causeou don't think about that, but everybody's gonna encounter, everyone's gonna need a funeral at some point. Some, something like that. And so that was just something that I was like, oh, this is an interesting for someone who really wants to work with people in tough times.

That's a really good one. Yeah.

Ryan: The third job career, instead of social work, Is a 911 dispatcher.

Hannah: I felt like this fell under social work because it reminds me of, there are people who are drawn into social work because they wanna work with people in crisis.

And I'm like, a 911 dispatcher is that's kind of what that is,

Ryan: Yeah. And the median salary for that is $48,000 a year.

Hannah: And then obviously this one is a really important job. It goes without saying that this is a really important job. If you call 911, and no one answers the phone, that would be really concerning, because who is gonna help in case of an emergency.

Right.

What's cool about this too, that I think is that's different from the others is that this one's shift work. So you can you have a little more control as you move up, I'd imagine you have a little more control , over your life. So you might be able to work night shifts, you might be able to work day shifts, you can work part-time,

Ryan: Control as far as the shifts that you're working.

Hannah: Correct.

Ryan: Because. 911 dispatchers need to be on the clock 24/7, right? There's somebody working all the time. And so depending on your township, depending on however your dispatchers work. Eight hour shift, eight hour shift, eight hour shift. Right? You could work the, A shift to B shift or the C shift or however.

Hannah: Yeah. Ryan knows more, a lot more about this than me, but, it's a cool job. Can be stressful, definitely because you're dealing with crisis, but if that's something that you want to do, if you wanna resolve, if you wanna help you wanna hand in resolving crisis. Great job.

Ryan: Yeah. And so with the 911 dispatchers, it really depends on. The thing that we have to be careful here is some cities, townships. They only hire, like, say you wanna be, and this is usually in bigger cities, but

Hannah: more controlled

Ryan: Say you wanna be a police dispatcher. So, let me back up all the way to the beginning.

All the way beginning, real fast. So 911 dispatchers, just cause I have.

Hannah: We're gonna, we're gonna ask our resident first responder.

Ryan: Yeah. So 9 1, 1 dispatchers. They there's a couple of different flavors and you have for usually smaller towns, they have, exactly what that is. 911 dispatcher.

Say 911, like, what is your emergency? And some of 'em may not give you like an option.

Right?

Most of them, all of them do, and there's dispatchers there that are trained to dispatch fire, police, EMS, and then lifeguards, if you're around oceans or lakes or whatever. But if you're usually speaking, if you're in a bigger city, they have police dispatchers. They have fire dispatchers, they have EMS dispatchers. And then if you're around a body of water, they have lifeguard dispatchers.

Hannah: Do you know if there's a mental health hotline or crisis hotline for the city, does that go through police or is that its own wing of dispatchers?

Ryan: Usually, if it's for the city, usually those are different. Those are gonna be social workers, those are gonna be exactly social workers. I mean, it's still a crisis and it needs to be dealt with, but then they're going to usually dispatch a crisis social worker.

Hannah: They're nicheing it down basically.

Ryan: Right? Exactly. That's somebody that's more equipped at conflict

Hannah: resolution

Ryan: resolution when it's more like interior, that's weird, but,

internal,

internal. Yeah. Interior your house.

Hannah: Interior conflict resolution. Yeah. Lots of different kind of, yeah.

That's a different kind of resolution.

I hate the shag carpet.

Ryan: So also what I wanted to say about that is that some places also. Require their dispatchers to also be whatever they're dispatching. Not a lot of places do this, but some places do where if you are a fire dispatcher, Every fire, dispatcher that you talk to in that city county, whatever , they are firemen.

Oh, they went through the fire academy, they got their certs

Hannah: or their cops.

Ryan: Right.

And f you call a cop they're cops, oh, they went through and they did their, they went to the police academy, they went through their training. They did their stint and now couple years later or whatever, they rotated into their dispatcher role. Interesting. So with this specifically, You're gonna wanna pay attention to your county, your city, your township, wherever it is that you all you are and figure out how your dispatchers work. Most places in the country, the dispatchers are not.

Hannah: They're just dispatchers.

Ryan: Right,

The most places in the country, they are not first responders. They like cuz there's two different. It's two different skill sets.

Hannah: You don't need them to be

Ryan: Right. Exactly. You don't need to.

Hannah: And it shrinks your pool of candidates, too.

Ryan: Exactly. It shrinks your pool of candidates and everything like that in certain situations, I can see how, maybe in the beginning, especially I can see the argument and I'm going on a tangent here. Sorry, guys.

I can see the argument for like becoming a fire dispatcher. And in the beginning, you're probably gonna be pretty good at it. I mean, you're gonna be better at it. As long as you one, you have radio presence,

Hannah: more specific. Yeah.

Ryan: Like you have radio presence,

Hannah: you know what questions ask

Ryan: You know exactly, but there's a checklist.

There's a checklist of questions. Yeah. So that's not that big. That's not that big of a deal, but you're pretty much. Cool calm and collected. You're used to communicating with the public. And then for the most part, you're able toput yourself in their shoes and be like, okay, this is what you have to do and walk them through it.

Like I said, it's being a dispatcher in many ways. It's kinda like. Being a pilot, there's a checklist for you to do, like you run through,here's what you do, especially in fires. I'm just going down that road. Cause I know that well. And can smoke flames, can you get out?

No, you can't. Okay. Is there, you know other windows? No, there isn't, go into the bathroom. Can you climb on a window? No. Okay. We'll close the door. Wet a towel, put it in a thing, right? Where, where are you? That type of stuff. Like, there's a list of questions that you need to ask. Sure. But anyway, so before you say you want to be a 911 dispatcher, just make sure that you look at whatever local.

Hannah: Because in cities, it might be different.

Ryan: Right.

Local authorities, how they handle it. Yeah. To be very honest. It's a lot of it is unions.

Hannah: I was gonna say, it's gonna be the union, probably saving those jobs for firefighters who can't be firefighting for whatever reason.

Ryan: A lot of it is unions. Yeah. I don't wanna get into it, but yeah,

Hannah: Once you get out of a city where there's a union, probably those jobs are separate.

Yeah. It's more likely be separate.

Ryan: What I mean by, I don't want to get into it-

Hannah: that's just the way it is.

Ryan: Just the way it is. Yeah. There's no right or wrong.There's no right or wrong about it. Just the way it is

Hannah: just is.

Ryan: Yeah. And so a college degree is not required for those. Though training definitely will be. And so just to kind of talk about, when you're a fireman for the Honolulu fire department and you go to FCC, the fire communication center, the, I think you still, even though you're a trained fireman to learn the dispatching system to learn your, The questions to ask and run to.

I think it's still six months.

Hannah: Oh, wow.

Ryan: Maybe

Hannah: you gotta train

Ryan: something like that. Yeah. Makes sense though. And the next. Job career instead of social work that we could look at is a paralegal.

Hannah: Yeah. People don't think about this one. Understandably so, cuz it, it seems like it'd be separate, but it's there's a lot of overlap with a lotof what most, I would say that your average social worker does.

Ryan: And so. Before you get into it. Paralegals, the median salary is $56,000 a year.

Hannah: And you can definitely make more than that for sure. Oh, definitely. Yeah. there's some highly paid. There's some highly paid paralegals. It's kind of crazy actually. And so there's. There's a lot of flavors of paralegal, so you can work, you can kind of pick, and this is where it gets cool because it's similar to social work in that you could pick a concern that you care about, right?

So you could work for personal Indus. Personal injury, medical malpractice, if you wanted to. Immigra- like immigration, immigration law, you could work for family court, bankruptcy, it doesn't matter. There's so many different types of law that you could just look for that specific type of law firm.

And then just do that type, try to do that type of work. Environmental, likeyou can literally, non-profit there's just literally,there's so many laws, there's so many law firms. And if there's a specific thing that you care about specific issue specific, cause that you care about legally and you wanna have an impact working in that, this is a fantastic way to do that.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. And one thing about the paralegal, it's very similar to social work and what you said to the point of what you said about the flavors and the different types. Paralegals also, there are a lot of different types of paralegals and similar to the funeral director. It'spredicated on how big your firm is and what your response that will dictate usually what your responsibilities are. And so. What I mean by that is so, yes, all those different types of law, but then in a small firm versus a big firm in a small firm, you might be the one stop shop for everything. Like it might just be the attorney and you.

The attorney files the paperwork on whatever he has to do. He goes and litigates and whatever he does, he or she does. And you do everything else. And so that could be like a hybrid between being an executive assistant, to being a receptionist, to working at a call center to being a mini lawyer and then also doing the role of a paralegal and, looking upwhat they need and-

Hannah: analysis, documentation, -communication, organization.

Ryan: And then when you go to bigger places, Just like most other thing, any

Hannah: your role gets more specific.

Ryan: Right? Exactly.

Hannah: Cause there's more people.

Ryan: And so you might not need to wear all those hats because there's more people. And now all you do is you look up this one specific thing, like say if you're in like litigation or something and the attorneys.

The partners are thinking about, you know, this creative, whatever defense or this creative pursuit. I don't know what they I'm mood all my adapt here, but follow me.

Hannah: We're not lawyers.

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. Obviously. And but if they say, I need help in finding some sort of legal precedence for this, or I need help in documenting this or whatever,

Hannah: or I need you to talk to the such and such and find out such and such,

Ryan: but it's all back of the house stuff. And you never do forward facing client work.

Hannah: You're doing research and analysis.

Ryan: Right. Exactly.

Hannah: But yeah, super, definitely super interesting field of work.

If you,especially if you like to find stuff and organize stuff and you have. You have that inclination. And especially if you're able to pick a type of law to work in, you can work in a type of law that you care about because you're gonna learn a lot about, you're gonna learn a lot about the intricacies and the inner workings of it.

And that to me is a super cool value proposition for working in that space. If you cared about a certain type of law, that's a really cool way to get involved. And also you just never really know what kind of opportunity that's gonna bring you. I feel like if you, especially if you're good at it, But yeah, there's a Reddit thread that's gonna be linked in the show notes for a paralegal who, talks about their experience working as a personal injury paralegal, interesting stuff. And then, it should be noted. A college degree is not required to be a paralegal at all, but analytical skills, administrative skills and communication skills are gonna be highly valued.

So anybody that's decent at those things. Good to go.

Ryan: And the last thing. Last career job that we are thinking about is applying at a nonprofit. And this is kind of like a roll my eyes,

Hannah: but it needs to be said, a lot of people think they can apply to nonprofit unless they have a college degree.

Ryan: What I meant my roll, my eyes is, it's just a really, it's like a cop out of a blanket statement, like really, but. It is. Yeah, but I did wanna say before we get into the nonprofit side of it, or, before we get, further down this road, is that a lot of people think that like nonprofits are the only way to go in order to do any sort of quote unquote charitable work or any like giving back.

There are companies that you could consider working for that do have like charitable arms to their business. Right. Think of Tom's. Blake Mycoskie what was that? That he like started pretty much started it, right? Like the buy one, get one. Buy one, give one shoes. Toms. We'll link if you guys, I knows Toms, but we'll link.

Hannah: What's it called again? Conscious capitalism, ethical capitalism,

Ryan: Something like that.

Hannah: Yeah. Generous capitalism. I forget the title.

Ryan: I'll look it up and put in the show notes.

Hannah: Yes,

Ryan: but there are those different types of companies,

Hannah: Altruistic capitalism

Ryan: that are, that do have a charitable aspect to their business.

Hannah: Yeah. Either they have a charitable aspect to their business, or they have a formal nonprofit wing attached to their business.

Ryan: Right.

Hannah: Sometimes

Ryan: True.

And so that's kind of a blanket statement, or I wanted to put that in there to kind of be considered in this "non-profit", even though it might be a for-profit company, but they do, good works.

And for nonprofits for any company. I mean, if you've been listening long enough, You don't need a degree?

Hannah: No, just go apply.

Ryan: Just apply.

Hannah: You wanna work at a, you wanna work at a museum? Just go apply at it. You wanna work at the red cross? Just go apply over there. Like you wanna work at the, you wanna work at the

Ryan: blood bank?

Hannah: Yeah. You wanna work at a local food bank? Go apply there. You wanna work at a homeless shelter? Go apply. Just to see what's open.

Ryan: That goes back to even if the, their job descriptions do say college degree required. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Just apply.

Apply furiously

just apply anyways.

Hannah: That is not something where I'm not saying that you won't get eliminated sometimes from those jobs, if you don't have those things, but to be perfectly honest, it, you, nonprofits of nonprofits of all things, I feel like, should really just be assessing people based on their individual characteristics.

that's like, you should really just be talking to people and figuring out if they're a good fit. For sure. But, and a lot of them do so.

Ryan: And so, with that's kind of a cop out. So with nonprofits, we didn't wanna say it like if you are, if you're not sure about social work, but you want to do help.

And one of these other four things that we already talked about and it doesn't strike your fancy and you can't think of anything else. This could be a way of dipping your toe in the water. And this could be a very low risk way of figuring out whether or not you wanna do this type of work.

Hannah: Its a great experience to show on a resume if you're gonna try to shoot up higher later, but also nonprofits historically, and most people know this, but a lot of nonprofits don't pay well. And if you have student debt. It's gonna be a lot harder for you to comfortably take that risk or take those jobs.

So you're gonna wanna apply and work at a nonprofit without the student debt, just go work there and gain experience. As opposed to first, let's go spend five and a half years in college, go into debt and then realize that it's. It pays 36k to work at a nonprofit instead, just skip over that whole part and just go make 36k at a nonprofit gain experience and then try to apply at different ones or try to work your way up at that one.

If you like working there. Yeah. Can be done. Can be done. Often is done. And definitely something, definitely something to note. There's not one path to do this. You do not have to buy a degree to work at a nonprofit or work in social work.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. And that's pretty much it for this episode.

Like I said before, links to everything is gonna be in our show notes. Degree free.co/podcast. And you can find links to everything that we talked about there.

Hannah: And if you wanna get more degree free, which of course you do, then go on over to degreefree.co/newsletter to sign up and you will get a weekly email from Ryan and I, jobs, resources, tpodcast information and all kinds of cool stuff that you're not gonna wanna miss.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. If you guys wanted to support the podcast, the best way that you could do that is by leaving an honest review, wherever it is that you get your podcast and sharing this with a friend. All right. Until next time, guys. Aloha.