I know a lot of you have been out of work for some time, and that all your efforts to find a job in your chosen field are getting no results at all. You’re probably starting to wonder if you’ll ever work again. What’s doubly frustrating is that maybe you didn’t love what you were doing all that much in first place. Given that there is so much uncertainty anyway, maybe it’s time to try a different direction – a career you’ll enjoy doing and where there’s a better chance of actually landing a job?
But starting out in an entirely new career in the current environment is no easy matter – it’s a decision that has to be made carefully. But there is another option. What if you kept the things about your current career that you liked, but got rid of those you didn’t? Looked at it this way, maybe your current career is the right one for you, with a few adjustments, of course. And if you’re looking for a job in your chosen field then it will make landing that next job a whole lot easier.
Here’s a simple way to determine if you’re headed in the right direction or not – I call it the ‘baby and the bathwater’ exercise. Grab a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side, list all the things about your job you don’t like – the negatives. And on the other, the things you do – all the positives. One you’ve finished your list look closely at the items on each side of the line.
Let’s say you’re a bookkeeper and on the negative side you listed things like “Doing math and calculations all day” or “Making financial projections”, then clearly this career is not for you. On the other hand, maybe those items were on the positive side and on the negative side you listed things like “The people I worked with”, “The commute”, or “Freezing my butt off every winter in this frozen tundra of a city”. Obviously, those are things that can be changed. In this case, the clear choice is to stay in your profession but make some changes – like the location you’re doing it in, or the team you’ll be working with.
But if your answers do make it clear that this just isn’t the right job for you, how do you go about deciding what is the right career path? There’s a simple way to figure that out as well. We’ll go over that in Part 2 of this posting.