Finding your way

Posted on August 26, 2007
Filed Under Coaching

Your way

I have a friend of mine who’s stuck with her life and career path. She is 25 — pretty young. She has a degree in engineering and worked in software industry for a few years — initially as a tester and later as a developer.

Last year she’d changed 3 jobs in a couple of months. The reason is that the work became not fulfilling. In fact, she describes her jobs as unbearable.

The situation is quite common. Many of us have been there. Time goes, our views change and values develop. So it’s not a surprise that our comprehension of our own day to day activities changes too. But where is the good solution? What steps should one take to restore (or find) the balance?

What happened to my friend is that she got stuck for almost a year trying to come up with new ideas and opportunities for her to pursue.

Yesterday we spent a few hours together brainstorming the situation. Cutting to the chase, here is the structure and the particular application to my friend’s situation.

Skills and experience. For my friend, we’ve identified the following: computer programming and testing, system analysis, writing, design and drawing, sport activities (mounting biking, snowboarding, skating, etc.).
Preferred environment. She feels that she needs a lively and supporting environment. Good and friendly personal relationships are of critical importance. She says it’s a significant stress to get into a new organization. At the same time, she’s interested in meeting new people; and once contact is established, communication is a fun.
Interests and passions. She likes formalizing and describing various processes (i.e. business analyst’s job is interesting, she was thinking of getting into this) and also her passions are physical activities like dancing, and teaching people. She has neither a formal education nor extensive experience in both of the latter. Finally, she’s dreaming of having her own small business but she has not yet have a clear vision or a particular business idea.

Next steps:

She’s going to investigate more about business analysis jobs available and identify the most interesting companies in the region. This seems logical as such work would utilize her existing experience and meet her interests and passion. As for environment, there is never a guarantee to get into an ideal one. Just need to look and select carefully in the process of job seeking.
Also she’s planning to find several dancing schools in the local area (we are living in a big city) and go look and talk to people working there. It’s a great idea to ask instructors a few questions about their work, how they’ve started, what are the most enjoyable and most challenging aspects of their work.

We’ll see how it goes. I think this is a good start for getting unstuck.

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