Turning your current job into a job you like
- career
I experienced a crisis of faith the other day after receiving another rejection for a job. For a period which fortunately only lasted half a day I became insecure and doubtful about my approach to finding a job I love in a place I love. Which was moving to that place without knowing anyone there, and then socialising, networking, volunteering, and applying for jobs like crazy. But you’ll be glad to hear that I’m now back to being happily deluded optimistic.
Many people I know are not willing to take risks in order to find the job they love, or maybe they don’t believe that there is one - fair enough, they might be right. So they take just any decent job that will do for them. But then most people I know are not entirely happy with what they are doing for a living, and some are thinking of changing jobs or careers, or dreaming of early retirement. I know I wasn’t happy with being a postdoctoral researcher - even though I liked some aspects of it a lot, and I liked my boss and my colleagues, I was getting paid very well, and I did research at one of the best universities in the world, I still found that my education, skills, and preferences could be more useful in a different setting. But while I still think that I am not cut out for an academic career I do now realize that I could have gotten more out of it while I was in it. Most jobs can be shaped to some extent into something that suits us better.
I came across this article “What to do when you can’t quit your job (even though you want to)” by Cynthia Jaggi on idealistcareers.org (link) where the approach to shaping your current job into a job you’d rather do is explained very nicely. I believe this might be helpful to anyone, but especially to people who are unhappy in their current jobs. An excerpt:
- Make a list of all the reasons you want to quit. Maybe it includes things like oppressive internal politics, a difficult boss, too much work, too much travel, not enough opportunity. When it comes down to it, you have too much of the hard stuff (amount of work, travel, politics, difficult people) and not enough of what you love (seeing your impact, feeling productive, generative conversations). You feel out of balance.
- Break your list into two columns. “Too much” and “Not enough.” Once you have all your items listed and divided, take a break.
And then basically be creative and find ways to do and get less of the “too much” category and more of the “not enough” category. There are some ideas on how to do that in the article. And even if shaping your job seems difficult it might still be worthwhile to make the list to get a clearer picture of what you want of your career - and use it for the next review or your next career move.
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