musings on career journeys

[parthenia]

For some strange reason, I seem to have finally started to take my freelance self seriously. I've spent the last 6 months doing projects that were outside my comfort zone terms of people and approaches and (she said cautiously) it seems to be slowly paying off. Had a meeting yesterday with my favourite client who has just asked me to do another 3-4 pieces of work over the next six months; and I've picked up a lot of work from a new client who is based locally. On the strength of this, I've bought some new office equipment, and I'm thinking about finding an accountant and finally registering for VAT. My sexy work life, let me show you it.

Anyway. It's a surprise, to have got here at all: I did career counselling about 7 years ago - very much one of those New Agey 'work out your passion and then go for it' approaches that I usually hate and, well, I'm now freelancing doing the thing that was second on my list of ideal occupations. Not the first one,but the second one. I will come back to that. ^^

After I identified my Dream Career, I stopped doing the career counselling and had to actually go and find some work. That's really the crunch with career change. It's bloody hard, because while you are desperate to try something new, future employers tend want you do more of what you just did; also, to get paid a living wage roughly commensurate with your life experience and credit card debts (as opposed to starting all over from the bottom), a wee bit of compromising usually needs to be done.

Aside from the early work I did with the career counsellor on identifying skills and passions, the most useful advice I came across was from a tiny little book on career change. This book suggested that anyone looking at a new career had to consider three things: their desire, the rate of pay, and the demand out there. As I said up there, I spent some time seriously pursuing Option 1, which I was truly passionate about. However, pay and demand were a lot, lot better for Career Option number 2, so - as a fallback - that's what I started to do.

The other key element in career change is to have some sort of bridging strategy between Old Work and New Work. It is a journey from where you are now, not just the flick of a switch. So, you don't ditch everything: you look for all your strongest skills and experience, and you think about how you can leverage them into New Work. This is fundamental.

What if there seems to be absolutely no way into New Work, i.e. to meet the people who might be in a position to give you a job? I definitely had this with Option 1, but it turns out there is usually a way.

I did a couple of things:
- blagged my way into conferences and networking meetings (passion overcame shyness)
- did an evening class first of all (also advice from the wee book: dip your toe in)
- found people who did roughly what I wanted to do and found excuses to talk to them about what they did

The fundamental factor, though, was believing I actually had the right to go after a job that I genuinely liked. I struggled for a long time with my inner Calvinist about the whole thing, and with a very deep fear that I was absolutely not allowed to do what I loved (and indeed, the very act of trying would whisk that goal even further away).

Indeed, this seemed to happen with my Number One passion. As the difficulties became clearer, the inability to make it work felt like a real failure. I couldn't make it take off. Interestingly, I don't think the career counsellor was off: it was a real possiblity for me. However a) it involved even more change b) it was very hard to do as a freelancer (I could almost certainly have done it as a full-timer) and c) it was emotionally very challenging. Too challenging, I think. Number Two was a lot lighter; it's more frothy and more of an escape from my domestic life.

I suspect that some degree of openness to this process of dicking around/trying different things is really important. The thing is, you don't know from the outside whether the perfect-looking career is actually the one that will fit you. The pitfall with the 'finding your passion' movement is that - as happened to me - if it's actually very difficult to do Thing 1, you just wash your hands of the whole concept and crawl back to your cave convinced that the world hates you.

Thing 2 is pretty damned good, and it's also taken a while to evolve. It's taken six years, at least, to get to the point I'm at now. There have been a lot of missteps, and I'm still changing and evolving in terms of understanding what I want and what will work. I still have fundamental problems with getting myself organised and managing my workload (oh boy yes) but at heart, I think I'm doing the right kind of job. That feeling is priceless.



I was very old when I started all this career change stuff. ^^ No, no, career's probably too heavy a word for my own journey. I changed trajectory, I think.

Huh. So: two, no three, simple steps:
- work out what you'd be great at
- go after it
- lather, rinse, repeat. Listen, reflect, explore, adapt, beg.

Talent isn't in the desire-pay-demand list, which is interesting. What part does talent play?

I might follow up by posting more about the 'Identify your dream job' process and how to make it work. Might. I promised that ages ago, and didn't follow through, but now might be the time.

ETA: Will reply to those thoughtful comments later - chat amongst yourselves. I'm kind of intrigued by career-change stuff, as someone who's been through it and read a lot about it (from personal interest and in a semi-professional capacity); and I'd like to come with a Better Way. Ot at least, a version that suits more complicated lives.