There are only two (2) kinds of job seekers looking for employment: those who are unemployed and those who are employed but seeking better employment. Regardless of where you are in your career, but especially if you are just beginning your career, you will want to ask yourself some questions:
1) What is your passion in life and what do you enjoy doing?
2) What do you hope to accomplish with employment?
The first question is really important. If you ask (and answer) that question of yourself BEFORE to go to college, if you are considering college, the answer can at times help you determine where you should attend school. For example, if you want to be a mechanical engineer, Georgia Tech would be a better school to attend than a college that produces businessmen or marketing specialists.
In order to be happy with your career choice, you need to enjoy, even love the work that you will perform. If you accept a position because it pays well, but that is the only advantage, you will be unhappy and a career choice full of unhappiness leads to other tragic choices. If you love music, ideal choices could be as a musician, choir director, disc jockey, music critic writer, music teacher or MP3 tester. But if music is truly your first love and you take a job as a software engineer simply because it pays more, the job will eventually become a grind and you will learn to hate it if you don’t already.
The next question that you should ask yourself is what do you hope to accomplish with your employment? If the answer is to become rich, very few people become rich through working a job. If the answer is to support myself or my family, that can very definitely be accomplished with a job. But you would be miles ahead of the game and your peers if you worked at a job that you enjoyed and derived satisfaction from doing.
There comes a time in some people’s lives where they take a job because they are desperate for the income. Taking a job that you hate or intensely dislike is understandable when desperation or hard times prevail. But you want to try and avoid circumstances like that whenever you can.
I took a position a few years back because the organization that I worked for restructured and I was the odd man out. Our economy at the time was still very poor compared to previous times and I ended up taking a job that I loathed because I needed to put food on the table. I thought the job carried potential, but I miscalculated the position and the people for whom I worked.
I stood my ground and eventually, the economy rebounded and I was able to find another job much more to my liking. There is nothing worse for your career than a job that is an albatross around your neck. Mondays become the most hated day of the week. Plan. Ask yourself those two questions.
Matthew 6:33
