I’ve sorted through some general ideas here, and I hope that this post reaches young planners, planning students, and aspiring city planning enthusiasts. The thesis is that there are branching pathways for career development in our field, and many planners and adjacent policy and design friends cycle through most of them at some point. This is a guide for you to feel comfortable in your career choices and to understand how our field is connected. I made it into a quick listicle to help ease this level of pedantic chatter into a more digestible format.
10 Careers For Aspiring City Planners
I’m a professional transportation planner, and have been for nearly 15 years, but these generally apply to most planning pathways.1 I’ll note where I don’t know enough and had to reach out to a friend, and if there’s anything particular about the pathway. I’ll also muse on a potential fun pathway from one pathway to another. I think that’s fun. Let me know what you think below.
1. Traditional Public Sector Planner
This one will look familiar to lots of my colleagues. You can start, continue, or end your career in public service. This can manifest in many different roles, both individual contributor and management, and can exist at all levels of government: from hyperlocal (block-level) to Federal. This type of role is ubiquitous and often essential to swan-dive into and/or out of at various points during a life: here, you’re part of the client team and see projects through, unlike some of the other paths below, whose roles often interact tangentially with projects or plans.
A pathway here could include seeking professional certification as a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) or other organization (TDM from the Association of Commuter Transit, Professional Planner for New Jersey planners, etc.).
Potential pathway: School (undergrad or graduate) → “Planner I” → “Planner II” → Consulting → Director / Leadership (either in consulting or public sector work)
2. Civil or Traffic Engineer…or Literally Driving Trains or Buses
Traditionally, a transportation “engineer” was an operator. Think a conductor on an olde-timey train. This job certainly still exists, and it’s a good union job, whether driving a train or a bus, or doing support work for either or both at a transit agency. A word to the wise here: even if you decide to go the other route, designing our systems, it’s good practice to seek out operators and drivers to understand their perspective and to make friends with people from different backgrounds. Don’t ever be a snob. You’re not better than anyone because you make more money or have more time in school. In fact, because these jobs are union, you can make a great living as a skilled and tenured operator.
A pathway here likely includes studying for and passing the Professional Engineer exams that allow you to “stamp” drawings that are used for construction. These take time and require both experience and judgement that only come with time. It’s not a short path.
Potential pathway: School → Grad School → Public Sector Designer / Private Sector Designer → Engineer-in-Training (EIT) → Professional Engineer → Leadership / Contribution Mastery
Potential pathway: School → Good Union Job → Leadership → Good Union Job → Union Leadership?
3. Policy Analyst or Government Affairs
The next pathway is less design or traditional planning, but more helping to write and influence the rules that make planning and engineering work. This pathway often runs parallel to traditional “planning,” with many policy-oriented folks earning public administration degrees instead of, or alongside, urban studies papers. Jobs here are also public or private: many offices inside the Executive Branch of many mayors’ (or equivalent) or governors’ offices hire policy hands to write or edit governing documents. Alternatively, many private firms exist to support this development; these particular shops leverage resources so the private sector can do more. These shops also work, in certain circumstances, to help advocates or think tanks develop solutions to problems they have developed on their own or with partners. Just a word to the wise: know what it is you’re getting yourself into politically.
Potential pathway: School → Grad School → Executive Branch (public sector) OR Policy Shop/Think Tank (prviate/nonprofit) → Elected Official or Staffer (legislative branch) → Leadership (public/private/non-profit)
4. Elected Official or Staffer
This one is narrower by nature. There are fewer elected officials than there are roles supporting them, and running for and holding office is a completely insane skill set that if you’re interested in, you can just…do. We need more “urbanists”2 and planners and engineers in elected office with power to make better decisions about spending and prioritization for built environment solutions. So if this appeals to you, it’s a great opportunity to think about building relationships early and learning as much as you can about your place. This path does require tenure or at least immunity from carpetbagging allegations.
Potential pathway: Literally anything → Get Elected
You can also work with electeds. This is similar to government affairs, but you work for the legislative branch, so your daily tools will be oriented toward lobbyists. The main difference is the essence of the job: working for the executive (DOT, Planning, Environmental, Housing, Finance, etc.) means working to implement or administer, while working for the legislative branch means you’re interested in changing the rules that we all (supposedly play by).
Potential pathway: School → Work a little to get some experience → Volunteer on a campaign (likely door-knocking at first, unless you already have some experience here; it’s relatively easy to move up with some dedication) → If your candidate wins, there may be a job for you at the end of the line.
5. Advocate, Activist, Organizer
Who are these people that attempt to influence lawmakers or lawdoers? Advocates, activists, and organizers. They all do so in slightly different ways:
Advocates work for organizations that fight for more general theories of change. They gather constituents around specific ideas and prove that there’s power in good ideas and big numbers. They’ll fight for causes like safe streets, affordable housing, better schools, safer environments, and so on. If there’s an injustice somewhere that donor(s) are willing to fund, there’s likely a nonprofit advocacy organization ready to go fight for it. These guys are the white hats and as close to pure good-doing as you can do in our field.3
Potential pathway: School (or not?) → Some level of domain expertise OR Deep nnthusiasm and a track record that demonstrates willingness to learn → Volunteer or Apply for entry-level jobs → Work experience → Public sector planner or policy analyst OR Staffer OR Elected.
Activists are the strong version of advocates. They’re often more radical and more public-facing and focus more narrowly on a particular project they do or don’t like and are willing to get arrested for the cause. (Sometimes. I do NOT advocate or suggest that you get arrested or do any crimes or crime-adjacent things.) Activists play a particular role in the stakeholder power map, and even if you don’t feel passionately about one particular topic enough to lay your reputation at a minimum out, you should continue to be aware that these people exist and will either be your greatest help or your biggest pain in the ass.
Potential pathway: REDACTED.
Closely related to the above jobs are organizers. These folks are the people-oriented staff inside organizations. They could work at any of the above jobs. Sometimes these workers are called community engagement specialists and have a particular set of skills geared toward the presentation of information and the receipt of related feedback. This process will make a project better if done right and will make a project worse if done wrong. The best engagement specialists/organizers are people with a deep empathy, domain expertise, and endless patience.
Potential pathway: School → Life → Demonstrating extreme levels of patience → Flowing in and out of different career pathways depending on the need to organize and fix misinformation.
6. Academic / Researcher
The purest career path on this list. You go to school, then you go to school some more, then you keep going to school, then you take a few tests, and then you go to school more, but this time there’s school to take the place of school. The challenge with the academic route is that it’s not easier than a non-academic path. Finding the program that fits your needs and style also has the right staff to support you and funding to help make you not die of scurvy. Then you have to find a job, which is extremely niche and scarce. You have to at least tolerate teaching, and you are often forced to publish to earn tenure. But once you get tenure, you can sort of …do whatever. As long as the program still exists and the world still needs academics to baseline practical application, these jobs will continue to exist. Godspeed.
Potential pathway: School → School → School → School → Advisory? → School → Retirement.
7. Transit / AV Tech Development or Sales
This is a relatively new field: there’s tech in planning, too. These companies often provide support to the public sector or compete directly if the public sector isn’t providing what the market has demanded.4 There’s certainly room for tech in planning. I see it as multiplying the impact of existing resources and keeping people who otherwise would go do tech elsewhere tethered to fighting for accessible streets and Good transit. There are lots of roles within these companies that align with the above career paths, but there’s also something here that’s different: sales. In public sector work, “sales” is just convincing the elected officials to spend OUR money on projects. In the private sector, especially in the tech world, sales is convincing elected officials to spend YOUR money on projects.
Potential pathway: School → Tech → Go work at the public agency you serviced while at tech → Consulting / Back to tech.
8. Traditional / Management Consultant
This is the place where you can make the most money if you want to work a lot of billable hours. I currently do this kind of work, and I enjoy it because I like the creative pursuit of projects and diversity of clients. I enjoy being able to get in and out of teams to work on pieces of a larger development. I like that I can be relatively mode-agnostic and work on pedestrian/bike projects, transit projects, road projects, etc. This works for my entrepreneurial brain and motivations. I like that I can work internationally and domestically and learn every day from people who’ve done this work for decades. I recommend every planner take a stop at a consulting firm at some point, if for nothing else than to earn perspective, which is always helpful.
Potential pathway: School → Grad School → Entry-level public sector or consulting → The other one → Leadership, hopefully.
9. Professional Critic or Content Creator
This is a relatively new role, and it grew with the rise in social media. It’s a new way to communicate and, honestly, doesn’t take any credentials at all, and can bring ideas to new audiences often out of reach from traditional media outlets. These people write for essay outlets and can support themselves through multiple projects, and the most successful ones can fully support themselves through the social media environments. That number is vanishingly small, and often these creators make little to no income from content creation alone, so this path, while requiring the least up-front investment, also has the lowest ceiling for success. If you do decide to create content for a living, you might want to find a secondary or tertiary source while you do this.
Potential pathway: A pen, a pad, a phone, a dream, a secondary job → ??? → Profit
10. Land or Property Developer
This last one is less transportation-related but still tangential: in a sane world, dense transit accompanies dense housing and mixed-use development. So you can become a property or real estate developer to work on TOD (Transit-Oriented Development) or otherwise new housing that we desperately need—everywhere. If you’re just starting your journey and transportation isn’t for you, then I really do suggest you learn Excel and surveying and get to building. You can work in non-profit development or for-profit development (we need all housing) and can work on building affordable housing, missing middle housing, or luxury development (I repeat, we need all housing for reasons you learn in grad school).
Potential profit: School → Grad school → Public sector planner / Development firm / Urban Designer → Developer.
The concentrations at Penn when I studied included: Housing, Community, and Economic Development, Land Use / Environmental Planning, Public Private Development, Smart Cities, Sustainable Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, and Urban Design, along with a separate, but related degree in Spatial Analytics. I will continue to argue that city planning and its discontents make up the ultimate liberal arts advanced degree.
I hate this phrase so much.
There’s something to be said about the fine line between advocacy and lobbying. The former is often associated with firms that incorporate under 501(c)(3) of the IRS tax code and the latter as a 501(c)(4) organization. There are specific rules about what you can and can’t do to be a non-exempt tax-free organization, but in practice the lines are definitely blurred. Once again, caveat emptor.
At least they say this.
I went in an opposite direction, from system engineers to transport planner/analyst. This suggests there is a matrix of the possibility (probability) of going from some trained discipline to a professional role. Also, why would the path from planner to systems engineer be hard?