Career Transition Contemplation | Contemplating Career Transitions

In the middle of it

Since I was informed that my job was going to be eliminated at my current company, I have been in the middle of it. What is the middle of it you ask?

Well, let me explain what being in the middle is at this juncture of my career. It is about finding balance despite being stuck in the middle and being simultaneously pulled in multiple directions.

Part of me knows that I need a job to continue to pay for a place to live and put food on the table. You know life’s basics. The longer my search goes the more this point starts creeping into my conscious.

On the other hand, my mind is telling me that I should take advantage of this opportunity to take some time and find something that I would prefer to do. Maybe this will go hand in hand with the previous point but it might not. This not only entails looking for a job but also identifying skills and continuing education to help me better position myself for those opportunities.

Finally, there is a part of my mind that is pondering a massive career change. Although I have been in the world of business, finance, communications, and systems for a long time, I have always been drawn to international relations and especially Latin American politics.

Lots to ponder and think about at the moment, but sometimes being stuck in the middle deciding what direction to go does have its advantages.

It Happened

It was something that I thought about for many months, really ever since I moved over to my new role at my current company. What happens if things don’t work out?

I believe that both my boss and I understood that we were taking on some type of risk with my move to a new department. Maybe, we both thought it could work, or maybe we both were just kidding ourselves. For me, it was always going to come down to who would blink first.

Well, they blinked.

I was informed this week that my position would be restructured and that my last day would be at the end of this year. Was this a surprise? A little, but not entirely. I won’t say that I performed poorly. However, my heart was not in it and I was stuck doing work that I did not enjoy and even worse did not feel that was much much value to my company. I felt a lot of it was busywork that was part of old processes that were so ingrained that they would be difficult to change, if not impossible.

Now, I have some type of freedom. It was a freedom that was forced on me but I am now free again to pursue something that better suits my skills, experience, and perhaps more importantly, my interests.

For those of you who are looking for jobs – stay strong, stay patient, and let’s do this!

Back to the Office…….?

Well, it happened. After some initial positive vibes about continuing to work from home, it now appears that the company is backtracking and wanting people to come back to the office. They say that people will continue to be able to work from home multiple days a week, but I think we have started to go down the slippery slope of returning on a full-time basis. Not good. Not good.

The good news is that there are others on my team that are also keen on keeping the work-from-home schedule mostly intact. As I find myself becoming more of an outlier – no I don’t share all the happiness of going back to the office – I am working on strengthening my position by doing some research on the benefits of working remotely. One of the things that I did come across was this fantastic quote from work and organization psychologist Adam Grant.

Productivity is Purpose and Process, not Place.

That really struck a chord with me and hopefully, as my company is still working on improving its processes, it will strike a chord with others as well.

Although I had my doubts going into the world of remote work, I have come to like it and feel that I am a better, more focused, and overall more productive employee. Outside of work, the fact that I am home means more time with family, more time to complete all of the household to-dos, and just a little bit more leisure to enjoy a beer at the end of a hard day’s work.

Rejection

When applying for jobs rejection is almost always part of the process, but that does not make it any easier. As I posted earlier I had applied for a job and spent a lot of time fine-tuning my resume, drafting and redrafting my cover letter, checking my online profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, and others. Earlier today I received notice that I was no longer being considered for the position.

Rejected. Something we humans almost always dreed. From high-school dances to team tryouts and trying a new recipe we are pre-programmed to want to hear something positive from others and have our courage, abilities, and cooking skills validated but we do not always get what we want.

Although I would agree that being rejected and not getting as far a long as one wants is not a fun feeling, this time I feel differnt. Going into this new phase of my career I am more prepared for rejection than in the past as I know what I am attempting to do will not be easy – career transitions rarely are.

I will take what I can from this experience, including how curteous the hiring manager was. A rarity now days as many times it is some genaric automated response that is sent.

No time to waste. Time to brush myself off and get back to the job hunt.

One Away

Getting a job app submitted.

After months of delay and waiting out COVID-19 it happened. I submitted my first new job application. It took way to long.

Like many things in life sometimes all you need is to take that first step. Now I will seek to maintain this rhythm as I look positively towards the next step in my career.

Working Content & Happy

With Covid-19 hitting the world hard in 2020 and still feeling its effects in 2021 I took a hiatus from my career planning and job searching. I did not feel it was the right time to up-end a large portion of my life with so many other things in flux.

Now that things are starting to get back on track, I have opened my career “folder” yet again and back to some career soul searching. Although many things have remained constant since I started to seriously consider a career change many have also sprung forth such as my ever more fervent desire to work remotely, solidly identify with a company’s value pillars and culture, and want to bring in an international component to a future endeavour.

To better organize things this time around I have taken a step back to help better define exactly what it is that I am looking for. With so many varied interests there are many things that I find appealing about a number of jobs or careers for that matter.

As I sought to focus my interests an idea came to mind. Instead, of just writing a resume/cv focused on my results, responsibilities, and the usual stuff, I started to rewrite what I would call an “Enjoyment Resume”.

Pure Enjoyment
Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

What an “Enjoyment Resume” is to me is going through each job that I have had and identify what it was that I really enjoyed doing in that role or at that company. As I started to go through my nearly 20+ year career I began to notice some trends. Some of these included: love to work on varied projects, seem to prefer a smaller company so I can wear many hats, found happiness in working with people from all over the world, loved more strategic and “big picture” work as opposed to more detail-oriented.

Now with this information on hand, I feel that I have a much better sense of who I am in a professional sense and just exactly what type of role and where I am the best fit moving forward in my career.

Can’t wait to get started. So if you are feeling stuck in your career search give an “enjoyment resume” a chance and perhaps you will find it as helpful as I did.

I Have Changed…for the Better

The end of 2020 allowed me some moments to take a step back from the world and reflect and what was happening to me. Many things were positive but I was mostly disappointed with my professional career and development.

I am a frustrated internationalist stuck in a role for a mid-sized upper-midwest based company. I have been spinning my wheels for the last 4 years trying to make things stick but I am not being true to myself. Currently, I am misfit and poorly cast in a role that does not suit me and even worse, does not benefit the company I work for in any beneficial way. I have sat on my ass for too long and it is beyond time that I start taking an interest in myself and what I want to do instead of living in fear of others and of the unknown. I know that I have the tools, the knowledge and the experience to make it work. I need to find the right fit and I know I can succeed.

Now the task is to make these realizations more of a reality. Here is to 2021!

Remotely Considering

remotely considering remote work.

I, as well as many others, were thrust into the realm of work from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There was no transition or no planning just a quick order from my company stating that all workers will now be required to work from home. This order was back in the middle of March. Since that time I have been working from home. Now, this is where things get interesting.

Pre-Covid-19 I had very little work from home experience. One rare occasions – afternoon appointment, home repairs – I might have worked a morning or afternoon from home but not more than a dozen or so times.

Having been immediately thrust into working from home I have to admit that I found the first couple of weeks somewhat tough as I needed to find a rhythm. Complicating things was the fact that I was in the group have to home school as well. However, once the new routines were established I began to enjoy whole work from home bit.

First of all, I felt that I had more time as I no longer had a commute to consider or all the morning small talk between entering the building and finding the desk. Secondly, I was in charge of my schedule. No more interruptions unless I wanted there to be an interruption. I do not miss the quick pop-by from a co-worker whose pressing needs were automatically a higher priority than any task that I was deep into. Third was just the freedom to set up my schedule. If I wanted to go for a run around noon and then work in the evening after kids went to bed I could. This definitely improved my productivity. The freedom also extended to my work environment. Moving around inside and outside my home helped me maintain my focus and give me a fresh perspective as well as enjoy some of the late spring and early summer weather.

As I consider the next stage of my professional career I would love to continue pursuing a remote work opportunity. I just feel a better worker, more productive and relaxed with a feeling of more control coupled with independence. Remote work …. here I come.

Back into it 2020

Turing the page into 2020 brings new challenges and new opportunities. Looking back on 2019 and professionally it was not a good year for me. It was highlighted by professional stagnation and an eerie level of comfort with they status quo.

I have taken the opportunity to talk to others about what I am looking to achieve and I do have some support out their in the form of family and friends. I struggle to take the first step and put my neck out there so to speak. 2019 was a year filled with “procrastination through planning”. I spent an enormous amount of time moving between different productivity methods and trying different tools always telling myself – I know realize that I was lying to myself – that they best most perfect tool is out there that will allow me to achieve my career goals. Even going into my search and evaluation period I know this to be the case but I let myself by into this fantasy nonetheless.

Some of my early goals for 2020 include:

More discipline – stay on target as a Star Wars fan might say
More Rejection – that means that I am getting stuff out there
More Experimentation – trying different avenues
More writing – I find I am a “better” person when I write more on really any topic.

Staying on Track

I started this blog several weeks ago as a source of inspiration and motivation as I begin my career transition journey. After a little bit of success I have hit a snag. I am struggling to “re-brand” myself and pivot my career experiences to a different career path.

You might say that this should be simple and your right. However, where I am struggling is I am not sure what I am trying to pivot to. Perhaps I can blame my liberal arts education that exposed me to many different ideas, topics, and issues that I feel going in one particular direction will close me off to many other areas. I have found that this hurts when I am networking and people ask me what I am interested in doing? According to many career sites, this should be a fairly easy and straightforward question that can be answered in a couple of sentences. Not in my case, as when I am asked something along those lines I can ramble on for minutes covering a wealth of topics and interests.

Part of me says that this is bad and I need to focus my career interests on something more specific. The other part of me refuses to do this as in doing so I would not be true to my authentic self. I feel that I can leverage my authentic self to help a company or client meet a host of different problems. However, I have not found the way to convey this to others.

I will keep trying and persisting as I know that this journey can be long and full of setbacks. Patience is key.