How to Find a Career You’ll Truly Love

Feeling job discontent? Work no longer fulfilling you? It might be time to change your career path. Here are some things to remember

There is a growing pressure for many millennials to find the perfect balance of pursuing their passion while making sure that they have enough money to survive on in the tough arena of this thing called adulthood. After all, prices continue to skyrocket and more and more millennials are found to be living with their parents, renting shoebox-sized apartments with six other people, or foregoing practical things like owning a car. Much has been said about the importance of finding one’s passion and even more about making a living out of that passion.

But what do you do if you feel like you’ve done all the right things: you pursued a course in college that you loved (and that wasn’t chosen for you by your parents), you interned at all the right places, met all the right people, and finally, you landed your dream job””or at least, what you thought was your dream job, because suddenly Sunday rolls around and instead of excitement for the week to come, you feel dread and emptiness.

Don’t worry, it’s not just you: for many people, job discontent is a real struggle. But for a whole generation of individuals who are pressured to be a thousand things all at once, it can be a crushing””and some might say even unnecessary””weight.

So, how do you make sense of this struggle and most importantly, how to come out of it on the other side with a career you love and without feeling burnt out? It’s easier said than done, but a career change could just be what you need. There are many factors that bring forth the need for a career change, but a lack of fulfillment is a big one. You might be asking, how do you accomplish this without just quitting out of nowhere and losing job stability? How do you go about it by making sure that you’ve got enough safety nets before bidding farewell to your current career? Changing your career requires bravery and a leap of faith, so here are some things to remember before you take the leap.

Start with yourself, and start slow.

The most important thing to remember is that change isn’t going to happen overnight. It probably won’t even happen in a few weeks or a few months. It needs to be gradual, and it needs to start with yourself. Take a moment to survey what you’ve accomplished in your career so far. What roles you’ve taken up, how much work you’ve put in, what goals you’ve reached, and what values you’ve developed or dropped in the years you’ve been working. It matters to know where you’re at, exactly, so that you don’t go into the process blindly. Sometimes, a career change comes in at a crossroads, when you’ve been doing the same thing over and over for so long now that you feel like your work life has lost meaning.

Ask yourself questions.
Part of the process of introspection and reflection is asking yourself a lot of questions. These can range from objective ones (“What don’t I like about my current job?”) to more existentialist ones (“Where does the world need me most?”). Whatever it is, asking yourself questions about your career can help when you discern what field or industry you ought to be in. Below are some examples.

• What do I excel in?
• What am I most curious about?
• What motivates me to get up in the morning?
• Do I enjoy freelancing or being in a company ?
• What am I most passionate about?
• What are my hobbies and interests? Do I want to pursue them even money didn’t matter?
• What am I most scared of?

Chances are, you already know the answer to these questions””it’s a just a matter of admitting them to yourself and maybe saying them out loud. Maybe you want a job that will really challenge you because the one you’re in right now isn’t stimulating your brain anymore. Maybe you want a career that will take full advantage of skills and talents you have that are completely unrelated to your job. Maybe you want to make your own startup!

Ask other people questions.
If you have a mentor””be it a former boss or supervisor, a former professor, or someone older and wiser that you’ve forged a relationship with””ask them for advice and their opinion. Employees who have mentors have better chances of landing jobs they want and understanding the industry from an insider’s point of view. But it’s important to get the opinion and perspective of more than just one person, so: ask your friends, your former officemates, your former classmates or orgmates, your connections and listen to what they have to say. In short, people you’ve worked with in a professional capacity, whether it’s at a company or in your years as an undergrad. But of course, make sure that these people know you well enough and vice versa. It’s important that there’s mutual respect and trust in order for this to work.

Make a career plan.

Having something concrete and tangible to hold onto will go a long way. In your search for a career that you’ll truly love, map out where you want to go and where you’re headed””two things that sound similar, but are wildly different. The former is about your career direction in the terms that you want it to go, and the latter is your career direction if you remain stagnant or unmoving. When you make your career plan, you don’t have to follow it all at once””or at all, even””but visualizing your goals and what you want your career to have may be a good idea. You’ll be able to look at it and see where you could focus all your energies on or where you could study or learn more.

Don’t ever settle.

When you’re on the precipice of something as big and as life-changing as this, you deserve a result that’s more than just an, “Eh, this’ll do.” You’re forging a new career path in the hopes of leaving and saying goodbye to an unfulfilling one, so don’t settle or compromise with a career path or a job that also doesn’t feel fulfilling. You want to make sure that you’ve made the right decision, so in your quest to find the career that’s meant for you, remember to never settle with what’s laid out in front of you or accept the first offer that you’re given. It’s just like negotiating a salary””the best job out there isn’t the first job that you’ll land. It takes time, a lot of hustling, and some back and forth, but in the end, if you stand firm, you’ll end up with a career that you’ll truly love (and will truly love you back).

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About SEEK Asia

JobStreet.com and jobsDB are part of SEEK Asia, which is the leading online employment market place in Asia. SEEK Asia covers 7 countries namely Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

SEEK Asia is the extension of the Australian Securities Exchange listed company called SEEK. The company’s purpose is to help improve people’s lives through a better career. SEEK Asia’s database consist of over 500,000 corporate hirers and over 24 million candidates.

For more information about this article, or to schedule an interview with JobStreet.com Philippines, please call Paola Savillo, Marketing Supervisor, at 286-6222.