Tag: transition | Career Transition Contemplation

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!

The Transition Ebb and Flow

I somewhat took my current position out of necessity. I had just moved back to the U.S. after living for nearly a decade abroad, had a kid on the way, and the job market had not fully recovered from the 2008 recession so opportunities were few and far between.

It was not the easiest decision for me to take as it meant putting aside some of my true interests; Latin America, Spanish language, multi-cultural understanding, international business, etc. But, with a lot of personal things happening obtaining something stable did outweigh overall career and job interests.

This is not to say that things were all so bad. In the start it was nice to have a steady paycheck and have some consistency in my life for the first time in a while. However, I became complacent and now I feel that I am paying the price. I have sat too long in one spot and as I look to start making inroads back into my true interests the obstacles are bigger than when I first moved back to the U.S. those many year’s ago.

Now, I have been put into a box based on my recent experience and skills that I have developed over the last 5 years. Not that this is bad it just complicates matters as I am looking to moving into a new type of role. All the recruiters and algorithms focus on these skills and experience and not on what I have done in the past and all my career experience brings to the table.