The Informational Interview: The Most Direct Way to Understand Any Career

Kanar (2023) ran two studies with university students and found that a single informational interview meaningfully raises confidence in navigating professional networks — but only when the conversation produces actual learning, not just contact.

Most career decisions get made on image. You picture a lawyer in a courtroom — not a lawyer spending 70% of her week in document review. You picture a designer building beautiful things — not a designer in a cycle of revision requests and stakeholder calls. The gap between the image and the job is often enormous, and you typically don't discover it until you're already inside.

An informational interview closes that gap before you commit. One honest conversation with someone doing the work can be worth more than months of research from the outside.

What an informational interview is — and what it isn't

An informational interview is a short, structured conversation — typically 20 to 30 minutes — in which you ask a professional about their work, their path, and what the field actually looks like from the inside. You are gathering information, not asking for a job. That distinction matters, because it changes how the conversation works: the pressure is off on both sides.

It is not a job interview. You are not being evaluated; you are doing the evaluating. It is not a networking event, either — this is a focused one-on-one exchange, not a handshake round. Career centers at universities across the U.S. have systematically incorporated informational interviewing into their core curriculum for exactly this reason: it is one of the few tools that puts the student in the role of the investigator rather than the applicant.

What you get from it is hard to replicate any other way: a ground-level view of what the work actually involves, what traits the field rewards, and what the professional genuinely wishes they had known before entering it.

Why it works — but not automatically

Adam Kanar (Brock University) ran two studies to test what informational interviewing actually does to students' confidence in navigating professional networks. In Study 1 (n=90), students who completed a single virtual informational interview reported significantly higher networking self-efficacy than those in the control group. One conversation. Significant effect.

Study 2 (n=72) added a more important finding. Kanar measured not just whether students attended the interview, but whether they reported learning during it. That variable — self-reported learning — moderated the pre-to-post effect on self-efficacy. Students who said they genuinely learned something from the conversation gained the confidence boost; students who had the conversation but didn't report learning from it did not show the same effect.

This is the counterintuitive part: showing up is not enough. The benefit comes from active engagement — asking real questions, processing what you hear, letting it change how you understand the field. An informational interview where you say little and absorb little is just a polite chat. The method works when you work it.

"We learn who we are in practice, not in theory — by testing reality, not by looking inside." — Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity, 2003

How to get the meeting

The three most reliable sources are LinkedIn, alumni networks, and second-degree connections — people your professors, former managers, or friends know well enough to make an introduction.

LinkedIn is the most accessible starting point. Search by job title and filter by school or location. Alumni networks are often underused: people who went to your school tend to respond at higher rates because there is already a shared reference point. A warm introduction from a mutual contact gets even better results.

When you reach out, keep the message short: one paragraph, a specific ask ("Would you be open to a 20-minute conversation about your path into X?"), and a clear signal that you are not asking for a job. Most people are more willing to talk than you'd expect. A reasonable working estimate: three to five yeses out of every ten outreach messages, though results vary with how targeted your list is.

Start with two or three people, not ten. You want to have the first conversation, learn from it, and adjust your questions before you have the next one. Sequencing matters.

What to ask: questions that reveal the real job

Generic questions produce generic answers. "What does a typical day look like?" gets you a polished summary. The goal is to ask questions that require the person to think — questions they haven't answered a hundred times already.

Four questions worth building into every conversation:

• "What does a bad week look like for you?" Most people describe a field in terms of its best days. This question surfaces the friction — the parts that never make it into a job description.
• "What did you think this job would be like — and how was that wrong?" The gap between expectation and reality is exactly what you are trying to map. Someone who has been in the role for years can tell you what surprised them.
• "What do the people who struggle in this field tend to underestimate?" This reveals the hidden demands — the skills or dispositions that matter but aren't obvious from the outside.
• "Who else would you suggest I speak with?" Ask this at the end of every conversation. One good conversation should lead to the next. This is how you extend a small initial network into something genuinely useful.

The last question is especially important. Kanar's research documents that informational interviews build networking self-efficacy — the confidence to navigate professional relationships — partly by making the next step concrete. Ending with a referral request gives you that next step.

After the conversation: what not to miss

The work that matters happens right after the call. Within a day, write down the two or three things that most surprised you — not a summary of everything said, but what genuinely shifted your picture of the field. That shift is the data.

Send a brief thank-you note. Not a form letter: one specific thing you took away from the conversation. This is both courteous and useful — it keeps the channel open for follow-up.

As Ibarra argues in Working Identity, self-knowledge about careers doesn't come from introspection — it comes from contact with reality. Five conversations with practitioners in different fields will tell you more about what you want than dozens of hours reading about those fields or taking assessments in isolation. The assessment gives you a hypothesis; the conversation lets you test it.

After three or four informational interviews, a pattern usually emerges: one field keeps pulling you in, or one set of working conditions keeps appearing as a dealbreaker. That pattern is hard to manufacture from the inside. It surfaces through contact.

Sources

1. Kanar, A. M. (2023). Effectiveness of informational interviewing for facilitating networking self-efficacy in university students. The Career Development Quarterly, 71(2), 147–159. doi.org/10.1002/cdq.12318
2. Ibarra, H. (2003). Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Harvard Business Review Press.
3. NCES (2018). Beginning College Students Who Change Their Majors Within 3 Years of Enrollment (NCES 2018-434). nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018434.pdf

This content is for educational purposes and does not constitute professional advice.