As I’ve been continuing my journey in figuring out the best “career path” for myself, I tried a couple of exercises this week.
Also, I just looked up the definition of “career.” I’m still developing my opinion on it. But I don’t think I like the word as much anymore.
Career: an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress.
I like the last part. “Opportunities for improvement,” but I think the part I don’t like is that it seems like it’s talking about only one specific occupation. I’m not debating with whoever was in charge of writing the dictionary definition, I’m more so saying I had a misconception of what the word meant. I like to see “career” as more of your entire journey through life. Whether all in one kind of job or in multiple kinds of jobs over many years.
I digress. Let’s get into the exercises.
Exercise One: Likes/Dislikes Challenge
To look at previous jobs and make a list of all the things I liked about them and all the things I disliked. One rule: don’t make any specific references to what kind of job it was.
The idea behind this is that you can start crafting an idea of what kind of things, in general, you have enjoyed/hated with past jobs, which in turn allows you to look for those things before you get into future jobs.
Almost everyone I know constantly complains about their job. Some of them I know for a fact actually enjoy their job, but it’s like they have to fit into this social norm of “you’re not cool if you like your job.” More on this in a previous post.
Let’s get specific.
If you truly do hate your job, why? Can you pinpoint the reason?
I did the exercise on five of my previous jobs. Three of them I found it hard to find things I actually disliked and 2 of them I found it hard to find things I actually enjoyed. After looking into all of these jobs it was time to find the “average.” Put all of these likes and dislikes together and see what I come up with.
Here’s what I came up with:
Things I like:
- Working with others towards a common goal
- Seeing the success of customers/seeing a project from start to finish
- Varied work each day
- Constantly learning new things
Things I don’t like:
- Working by myself
- Having no instruction to improve or learn something new
- Disorganization in the work environment
- Trouble-shooting on topics I have no clue in
Not an exhaustive list, but this gave me a launching board for my next exercise:
Exercise Two: Outreach to professionals
I’m not going to lie, I really disappointed myself with this exercise. The idea behind this exercise is to connect with professionals in an area that you’re interested in pursuing and ask them questions related to your likes and dislikes. For instance, since I am interested in going into sales, an appropriate question to a professional would be “In an SDR role, how often do you get to see a customer go from prospecting to final buy?”
Since I like seeing a product from start to finish, I want to know if in a sales role I’m going to get that.
I reached out to connect to nearly 30 sales professionals through LinkedIn, but I didn’t send very interesting notes with my connection requests. The next logical step would be to ask sales professionals that I already know (which I do have quite a few connections through my podcast on sales that I did), but once again, I wasn’t proactive in making it happen.
I Underperformed – Majorly
All-in-all, I was only able to ask about 3 sales professionals their thoughts on my questions. I still got some really good answers, but I am disappointed in my effort to get results.
After asking questions like the one above, I learned yet even more about sales. It’s very collaborative work, yet it’s a lot of work alone. It all depends on your supervisor if you’re going to have good instruction or not, and if you’re good at your job, you will absolutely be learning new things every day.
I wouldn’t say I’m more excited about looking for a sales role than I was before. I’m about the same. But perhaps I am more prepared for what to be excited about. By knowing already some of these parts of a sales job that might drag me down, I can prepare for those ahead of time and be able to make the most out of them.
In any case, even though I didn’t use the second exercise to its full potential, it has inspired me to continue working on my podcast project to interview professionals in all careers of life. It’s been in the works for a couple of months now, but it’s finally gaining some steam and I can’t wait to start getting it out there.
Let’s start having conversations with professionals. Let’s start making lists of what we need to see in a new job.
Let’s get purposeful about our careers and stop letting our search take a backseat to 4 years of college.
Let’s get it!