"How did you know which job to choose next?"
The question I get most frequently these days.
Lovely people of the Internet,
I’m savoring this April as if it were a giant juicy watermelon my hometown is known for.
It brings me joy that I’m increasingly getting to know the readers of this newsletter and their your own career journey ups and downs. One of the questions I get most often is how did I decide which industry was “the right one” for me to pivot to.
Today we’re focused on answering that question.
Let’s start with the TLDR (“too long, didn’t read”) version of it: I didn’t decide on an industry - I decided on a lifestyle.
Wait…what?
Let me preface the whole article below by saying that I’m not a career coach and this is not me giving you a “must-do” for your own professional path. This is me sharing my experiences - the platform has “Diaries” in its name for a reason. 🙂 With all that said, please practice discernment while reading my story and the tips below. Apply what works and discard what doesn’t.
Okay, now that we covered the basics, let’s rewind before we go back to the question in the title of today’s article.
It’s the summer of 2023 and I’ve been a solopreneur for almost 3 years and a freelancer for a few more before that. I know that something is not working because I see the signs: my income is inconsistent and I’m tired of the work-from-home scenario (since 2015!). I was a lucky person to have had clients who are compassionate, value-driven people, but I felt like I didn’t want to work in communications any longer. I was already a journalist, tutor and lecturer, social media content creator, creative writer, communications consultant, technical writer, event host and organizer, proofreader, translator… But I didn’t want to do any of those things. I had no clue what to do next.
As I wrote here, I picked up journaling to get some clarity. I thought that a new offer idea would pop up and all would be back to light & fluffy (when was it ever light & fluffy to begin with!?) because I didn’t see myself as a non-entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship gives you a level of professional autonomy that is like a drug and I couldn’t see myself not being the person who makes all the decisions and implements them on their own (that’s why there is “solo” in “solopreneur”, y’all).
And journaling worked like magic: it allowed me to see that my image of myself and my priorities was based on old data. I was different from the person I thought I was! By going through the prompts day after day, I saw that my real, raw, heartfelt answers to many questions were different than they used to be the last time I checked and made conclusions about myself, my hopes, and goals.
Autonomy wasn’t my main priority anymore - living a well-rounded life was.
Seeing my value through the lens of career achievements wasn’t something I was willing to keep doing. It was draining my energy, and what’s even worse, filled me with so much shame. Oh, how all the shame I was carrying was looking back at me from my journal pages!
Shame for being “late in life”.
Shame for being a person with diverse interests and a CV that looks more like a patchwork quilt than a crisp white linen bed cover.
Shame for not making as much money as I “should have” by the age of 30.
Shame for (apparently!?) not doing what I love - or not successfully enough - because if I had found it, I would never have had these challenges that I was facing at the time nor that feeling of “not enoughness”.
But shame was not all that was screaming for my attention from those pages.
The more I kept writing down the baggage I was carrying, the more it became clear to me that…
… I really liked my multiverse of interests…
… I really really liked my curiosity…
… And I really really really shouldn’t try to find “the one” career path to rule them all (#LOTRreference) because it’s not fair to my interests - AKA not fair to myself.
I didn’t know what to do - but I realized which criteria the next thing was supposed to meet.
The key thing: my criteria
As days went by and my pile of journal entries kept growing, my criteria for the “future job” emerged.
Remember, I still had no idea what to do next.
The list below is all I had.
Priority #1: The future job allows me to get outside the house for work. I’ve been working from home since September 2015 and want a change. Working from home is lonely - I want more people around.
Priority #2: Not too many people, though - I’m still a (chatty) introvert! 😁😅 I want to be able to work in a position where my only communication during work hours is with other team members. I don’t want to be in charge of the client’s side or to serve as a client-employer mediator. #yourgirlwastiredofbeingabridge
Priority #3: I want to have fixed work hours and I don’t want to take work home unless I take on a part-time job or something similar. Yes, occasional overtime is fine but I don’t want it to be the norm.
Priority #4: The job I’m doing should still be able to be connected to sustainability and in time, I’d like to specialize in the environmentally responsible way of doing the tasks related to my future position.
This is it. This was my list.
It didn’t start as a list - I just kept going back through my old journal entries and seeing some things mentioned again and again.
The reasons why I was tired. The concerns I had. The ambitions of the real-time me.
So I wrote them all down in one place and then turned them into a “dos and don’ts for a future job”. This became my list.
And this list was all I had for weeks. I decided to give myself time to ponder on what could meet those criteria. I enlisted the help of ChatGPT and asked it to serve as my career coach. I became better at prompting but still wasn’t much closer to finding the next thing.
It wasn’t until one day I wrote down the list on a piece of paper and let it sit on the coffee table while I brewed a cup of coffee for my husband and myself. My husband took a quick glance at the list and said: “You know that a career as a QA tester meets all your criteria, right?”.
I paused. My first response was: “But I don’t know how to code and am not sure I could learn it.”
- “You don’t have to unless you want to go towards automation testing.”
- ”(*stares at him in confused*)… Wait, what? Let me do some reading.”
That’s how my research into quality assurance began. Wouldn’t you know it - it actually did meet all of my initial criteria so I began to study. And here we are today. :)
My conclusions
Let me bring to your attention a peculiar thing: I didn’t put “I have to love it” on the list for one simple reason - I love many different activities.
I’d like a job that I know how to do and that I feel is related to my values (i.e. the sustainability part).
But being good at something comes with repetition and has nothing to do with whether you love the thing or not.
There are 89324239 things I adore doing. My job doesn’t have to be a thing that I love, but my life does. I want that life to be a playground for the 89324239 things and the lovely humans I could do them with, regardless of work.
If my future job can be tied to sustainability, that’s enough for my value system. The only thing my new career path has to do is not be a detriment to the world.
It’s very easy to turn my experience into a set of steps to follow.
Step 1: set some time for introspection. Use a journal, a voice recorder while you’re out on long walks, or any other method that fits you best.
Think back to your previous work experiences and see which experiences you wouldn’t like to repeat. Why? Were there any particular ones you’d love to have more frequently in the future? Why?
If you saw yourself as “career dehydrated”, which aspects of a future path sound like they would nourish you, replenish your energy, make you grow?
Start there.
Let the criteria be your starting point.
Then comes step number 2: talk to people. Ask them if they know of any jobs or industries that match the criteria on your list.
Go to the people you love or AI LLMs like ChatGPT. Or both. Or offer people a poll on LinkedIn.
Ideally, you’d go to someone who’s outside your industry (my husband was working as an HR specialist in IT at the time) because you want someone from a different bubble (mine was all about sustainability communications & green marketing).
And finally, step 3: research their suggestions & see if any of them actually fit your criteria and seem like something you could or would want to learn. Some suggestions might just seem “meh”. Others will not yield many entry-level job opportunities in your current residence. Watch some career vlogs of people doing the same job on YouTube, read up on what an average workday would look like and which of your current skills would be valuable in that role.
What then?
After that, it pretty much all boils down to studying, networking, repackaging your experiences, more studying, more networking, and trusting that you’ll be able to carry out whatever you set your mind to.
Remember: you can always change your mind. You can try the new career path and find out that it doesn’t fit your criteria IRL or that the criteria themselves need to be updated.
I still don’t know if I’ll be a good QA specialist. I want to be, though, and I allow that desire to be enough at this point in my life. I like that testing can be tied to increasing the quality and accessibility of software products. I like that it is all about thinking like the end user, just like my previous work in communications. I’ll be able to form better-rounded conclusions once I’ve been in the industry for a while, so I’m not putting the pressure on myself to have all the answers. :)
Let it be known that I’m much happier than this time last year and that I have a level of clarity of the kind of life I want that was nowhere to be found last summer! 😁
This is the main conclusion of my experiences so far:
Don’t start with looking for a “perfect job”.
Start looking for something that’s aligned with your current priorities.
Build from there.
I wish you all the luck in the world!
Your neighborly “It’s articles this long that make people refuse to believe that I’m actually an introvert” scribbler,
Andjela
P.S. I have a favor to ask: This platform is still super tiny in all honesty, I haven’t done a single thing to promote it in months. However, now that there’s a decent amount of articles in the archive, I’d appreciate it if you took a few minutes to share one of them - any that you found particularly useful - with your community, whether here on Substack, or on X, LinkedIn, or any other platform. Thanks in advance!
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Welcome to the Career Pivot Diaries where I chronicle my journey from sustainability communications to QA testing! This is where we’ll cover all things career change, such as going from entrepreneurship to 9-to-5, exploring new professional identities, and *finally* updating that dusty CV. Most importantly, we’ll explore how to see ourselves as more than our work and find a sense of safety in choosing a new path while allowing room for creative play.
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