Finding a career, now with slightly less existential dread!

[Cellmold]

If you are at place X, then you got there somehow. If you didn't take the steps to be at place X you wouldn't be at place X. Maybe you would be at place Y.

Moral of the story: if you take steps, you will go places. And if you don't take steps, you will also go places, but more of the non-place kind of places, in a metaphorical kind of place.

Baby steps.

 

[SearchingforPeace]

Great topic. Finding a career that works is very important, yet understanding what will work for anyone is difficult.

I have a friend that went right into a job after college and grad school and were happy from day one, at the same employer, working in the same exact subject area. I have another friend that backed into a career that was really just a part time job not in the field he desired that now they is extremely well compensated 20+ years at a top 100 corporation.

Not my path, unfortunately. I am currently sitting at my very good paying job that I completely despise, trying to figure a way out. It takes so little of my skills and talents and is dehumanizing to say the least.

I have had two major careers, neither really similar to the other, each with major drawbacks. These two careers were ones I had picked as a child. I reached my goals and was very disappointed. I see now that most of the problems in the careers relate to me and that finding myself will help me to better find happiness in work.

My thoughts on jobs:

There are many different jobs in a given career. In my youth, I had some good fitting jobs but for horrible employers. The environment was awful. I should have just tried to find a good environment, but at the time I couldn't see that I blamed the job for the sins of the bosses.

I ended up radically changing jobs inside that career. I was warned by a mentor that kill my soul, but I did it anyway. And he was right. I moved to a less people oriented position and became extremely unhappy, so much so that I wanted to completely change careers.

In the background of all this was that I had an unpleasant childhood that left me with scars and blinded me to myself.

So, I hit my mid thirties and was depressed and didn't know the cause. I blamed my career, which could have been solved with modest changes in the job, but I didn't do that.

Instead, I pursued radical change to my other career. It brought about short term happiness, but once there, I encountered other pitfalls and disliked it.

So, I went back to my old career, but in a different job, one I hate. I said it was only short term, but that started 4 years ago. .... and I still haven't moved on.

Several mentors have suggested yet a third career for me, that would sort of combine the first two. It could work, or just turn out like the last two careers. I am looking primarily at new jobs in my first career, jobs that I know would provide good job satisfaction and use a healthy portion of my talents, but the third career would seem like a golden fit.

Additionally, I need a career that provides value to the world. So there are many jobs in these careers I couldn't do, as I have learned from experience. My current position is empty and soulless and the sooner I leave the better.

 

[Bush]

If you're in college, and if your university has a co-op or internship program.. take it. Or at least heavily consider it.

I was enrolled in a co-op program where we'd take one semester full-time, one working with some company full-time, rinse and repeat. I was fortunate in that mine paid pretty well for what it was. As an engineering student, I worked in test design for a tech company. (More intriguing than it sounds.)


During my first semester there, I mostly laid out diagrams for overseas manufacturers, who would need to testing the stuff they built that was designed by my department. To me, it was also more intriguing than it sounds. Because it involved finding the best ways to communicate to a foreign audience -- generally, to package and present information to some target audience. No BS technical jargon, no 100-page documents, no complex English. Very different from technical manuals that engineers would typically put out there with little clue about -- or consideration of -- the people who would have to use the thing.


My last semester involved designing a huge freaking rack that had to be capable of testing everything in our department. Much like

but more awesome.

So actual, really real people would have to sit down and use my thing. So it had to be comprehensive. Holistic. Intuitive. And so I went off and actually talked to people about what they needed to see, which instruments they used the most, and so on. I had to mash all of that into a rack with finite space. I oversaw the costing, design, construction, and performance of a system that folks actually had to use. I didn't touch the nitty-gritty circuitry design like the engineers did.

They liked their stuff; I liked mine.


Three takeaways:

• From the engineers' standpoint, my stuff was busywork. From mine, their work was. I found that the engineering component wasn't for me because I had experience. But presentation, communication, system design, and actual interaction with people were. You bet your ass that I steered my career accordingly before I picked up a job that wouldn't satisfy me.
• Even if I had stuck with engineering -- well, many of those engineers never had actual hands-on experience. Ever. Their experience was all in designing intricate, complex circuitry etc. And so they couldn't think like the technicians who carried out their designs. And so they made mistakes from time to time -- and the technicians who built their stuff were the ones to catch them. At least, that was my perspective.
• Also, it's great resume material.

It's a much harder decision if your only options are unpaid internships, but it's still worth consideration.