You may have done a degree or diploma in a specific discipline and once you are out there searching for a job, you realize there are few opportunities than you thought. You may have worked in a specific industry and for various reasons, want to move on to a different industry all together. These are just but a few reasons why you may want to leave your career for another but among these there are more reasons. Well today we live in an era where 40% of the workforce consists of generation Y and experts describe this as the most dangerous generation in white collar offices. These are our current youth who want success like yesterday, so you can imagine paying them peanuts; you are in for a rude shock.
This generation will change careers for even a worse job but better pay and that is the world we live in. A friend of mine over at PriceWaterhouseCoopers told me one day about a story where there boss then (he has then moved on) was giving them a lecture about ‘Career Vs Money’ where he paused a question if any of them will want to work for him whereby the employee sings for him in the lift to his office and waits for him in the evening to sing for him in the lift on his way home. This dubious job will attract a salary of Sh. 1 million. Of course everyone said, ‘No, no, no way.’ but when they went talking over lunchtime on their own, everyone accepted that they will without a doubt take the job graciously.
This just shows you that, people can easily take a job for various reasons but money dominates instinct. If you asked most professionals currently in the corporate world, they will tell you that they changed jobs for many reasons but the leading one being bucks: just enquire from your colleagues who have left auditing firms and changed their careers, I bet they have the best reasons.
Changing a career needs a lot of thought and consideration. As much as I will want to encourage you to stay on, if you don’t like a job or your career, leave and change it at the earliest opportunity. People in our economy want to change careers but today I want to give you food for thought before changing your career. Do you have the ideas to change it? You know, it is the lack of career change ideas that seems to keep many would-be career changers stuck. The problem is they are stuck in a habitual pattern of boxed-in thinking that prevents them from seeing the wealth of possibilities that are out there.
Here are a few tips to help you get out of that place and to help you to generate a range of new career ideas to explore:
1. Forget job titles: Job titles really inhibit your thinking. If I asked you to list all the jobs you could think of, you might come up with a couple of hundred before you ran dry. In reality there are thousands of jobs out there that you would never identify under your own steam, so forget the job title and focus instead on the key themes that are important for you in a job. What do you want your dream job to involve? Research this by looking at various job adverts that you feel relate to your career with headings that you think are closely related to your field.
2. List what you don't want to do: This is often quite easy to do if you are in a job you hate and it can be a very useful exercise. It helps you to focus on the aspects of a job that really drive you nuts and then also identify those that are annoying in your current job but actually you'd be prepared to put up with to some degree in a different situation. When you identify something as a no-no, ask if it would always be no under all circumstances. This will help you to avoid rejecting jobs in a knee-jerk way because they share similarities with your current role. Remember if you don’t know what you don’t want, then you don’t know what you want.
3. List what you think you should want to do: What do you think your career should look like? What pressure are you putting on yourself to confirm to certain benchmarks (e.g. I must be earning a certain salary, I should be in a professional role, it must be something that other people will respect and admire me for). Just check with yourself whose rules you are following here. Who exactly says that your career must look like this? Is this really what you want or what other people say you should aspire to? Under this, please make sure you take care of yourself and your needs and feelings first before what other people feel.
4. List what you would do if anything were possible: Yes, you are allowed to take the brakes off here and create a big dream. Forget the constraints you put on yourself, wherever they come from. If your fairy godmother arrived to take you to the ball, what job or career would you ask her to line up for you as part of the deal? Refer to an early article we wrote on ‘the secret’
5. List what you would do if you gave yourself permission to say that you want it: So often, we limit the possibilities in our lives because we just don't allow ourselves to want something. Maybe you want to earn lots of money - but that seems too greedy. Maybe you want to have an easy, quiet job - but that seems too lazy. Maybe you want to set up your own business - but you can't because you have to think about so many other people in your life first. What do you need to give yourself permission to want to do?
6. Reinvent yourself: If you could rewind the tape on your life and re-run it, what would you do? If you could dump all the stuff, the rules, the history that you have gathered on your journey through life to this point and travel light without the baggage, where would your journey take you? What would the new you look like and what work would this new person be doing? What does this tell you about what would really inspire you?
7. Think big and think small: Your new career does not have to be something world changing and grand. If you want to change the world, great! Go ahead and build your new career around this big vision. But if you feel drawn to operating on a more local scale, that's fine too. Small changes can be just as transforming for your career and your life as big ones, so don't be fooled into thinking that bigger is necessarily better. Career change success is about finding what feels right for you.
If you look at these tips, most of them direct you towards thinking about yourself first. Let me tell you a small story, a friend of mine went through one of our leading local universities and got a job with one of the leading multinationals. All his life, he wanted to become a DeeJay (DJ) but because his father is from the class of those old folks who believe in the classical approach to getting money and status, he did not approve of his son’s decisions. Just to please his folks, he did the job for two years and resigned to start his own deejaying unit without telling his father. Today, he not only enjoys the passion in his career but makes almost 5 times what he used to make in his white collar job. He has a radio station and soon going bigger. This tells us to follow our passion and in any career change, please listen to your instinct.
Follow your passion and be sure you will get self satisfaction in your career.
We at HCC wish you a wonderful career fulfillment.
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