Changing careers when you don't know what your dream job is

August 25, 2024 8:38 AM

If I'm honest with myself, I know I don't like my job and I'm probably in the wrong career field. But I have no idea what field I should be in. If this was you once, what steps did you take to figure out what you really wanted? Bonus points if you have a humanities degree that doesn't qualify you for specialized work.

Please don't recommend What Color Is Your Parachute. If you followed a process from that, or any other book, I'd like to hear about YOUR PROCESS.

posted by robot cat to Work & Money (14 answers total)

what color is your parachute is a really...oh

well, right livelihood is the basic principle [wiki]. i still don't know what i want to do with my life. gotta pay the bills though, right?

so, i look at the jobs in my area, narrow by what i might want to do/seems interesting enough & check company ethics. if the company isn't actively destroying humanity, etc., they're worth looking into further
posted by HearHere at 9:50 AM on August 25

Yeah okay look, do you really dream of having a job? I don't. If I had it all to do over again I'd go be born into generational wealth. But since that's not in the cards, what I dream of instead is making enough money to build myself some security and comfort so I can have a life outside of work. Beyond that? I want my employer to respect that I'm a human being and not actively be making the world a worse place. Beyond that? dgaf

I see that you've asked a few questions over the years about what your work goals should be, and what that tells me more than anything else is you don't really have any. I want to ensure you that THAT'S FINE. Work is rarely a source of absolute fulfillment for MOST people. You don't need to be living in your passion or whatever bullshit people say.

So I would encourage you to sit with yourself, or maybe talk with your therapist, and really think about how you would feel if 10 years from now your life looked exactly the same as it does today. Would you be happy? Sad? Neutral? If sad, okay what's missing? Is it really a job title, or is it more like social things and life experience things? I don't know for sure obviously but I suspect no one's ever died wishing they were a better Senior Customer Success Analyst.

Speaking only for myself, I have made peace with the fact that I have an exceptionally boring job that no one dreams of, which I only kinda fell into by accident. Kindergarteners don't draw pictures of themselves as middle management HR operations. But you know what? I'm paid fair, my boss treats me with respect, and I can shut off my computer at about 5 every day with no one giving me shit. Because I've figured out what I really want, and it's not defined by a job.

I don't know, I hope that's helpful. It's been really good for me. I wish you peace on this journey.
posted by phunniemee at 10:22 AM on August 25

Hmm OK, rephrase. I don't need to find my passion. (I have hobbies that make me feel happy and fulfilled. They're not profitable and I don't want to try to profit off of them.) I want to find a job that doesn't stress me out and make me feel incompetent. This isn't impostor syndrome. My ratings have been going down and I get negative feedback. In one of my previous questions I said I liked my job and was doing well, but I got promoted and I can't meet the intellectual and creative demands of the higher level job. I want a job where people tell me I do good work and I'm valued. I don't know how to find that.
posted by robot cat at 10:33 AM on August 25

(And we don't really do demotions at my workplace. But I was kind of lying to myself about how much I actually liked that work anyway.)
posted by robot cat at 10:35 AM on August 25

OK, this may not help, but my career path story is at least short and true. In High School I thought I'd go into Math but (luckily) then realized how hard *REAL* Math really is. So I switched to seeing myself as a Librarian since I also liked reading and organization/categorization. I worked Summers at Libraries and found it to be quiet and dull (though it was helpful to others). Senior year of High School I touched my first computer (IBM 1620) and I knew at that moment that was what I was destined to be (Programmer). I also picked up on vibes that others found it difficult or at least challenging (but it wasn't to me, yippeee). I worked as a programmer in FinTech from 1976 to 2023 and now I'm comfortably retired. I guess there's not a lot to my story except that clearly it was somewhat of a random walk. Oh, and by the way, my college degree is technically a BA with dual major of Math/Computer Science. I hope the job faerie visits you soon.
posted by forthright at 11:02 AM on August 25

I finished a masters knowing I wasn’t going to do a phd and knowing I didn’t want to become an accountant. I spent a year plus temping and decided to suck it up and become an accountant because I was goi g to have a job that was going to allow me to be comfortable. At this point, many years post qualifying my day to day work entails zero accountancy.

What I learned quickly is what tasks and activities at work I found easy/intuitive and what I find challenging. And there were clear patterns. So whenever it was time to take on additional roles or pivot I made sure to take on things that played to my strengths. Every job entails a range of activities that require different skills and not everything feels easy or stressful.

In addition, not all stress is created equal. Something that is generally playing to strengths is still going to be stressful if the activity or role is new to you. Learning is exhausting. But that should pass as you grow into a role. On the other hand, spending most of your time doing things you do not find intuitive/that do not play to your strengths is a never ending source of stress.

So whenever I talk to people who are unhappy or at least unenthusiastic about work I ask them what aspects of their work they find enjoyable or at least not actively stressful. Knowing that allows you to focus on roles and activities that allow you to spend most of your time playing to these strengths.

That assumes a work environment that is not hostile or abusive etc. If the environment sucks it may be difficult to differentiate that from the underlying work.
posted by koahiatamadl at 11:56 AM on August 25

I've said for a long time that I think it is much more important for most people to figure out what you absolutely cannot bear in a job and use that as a disqualifier rather than trying to find jobs that meet specific positive criteria (except maybe for $). If a job has every positive thing you'd want but also every negative, it's not really possible to be happy with it, imo. Especially with a general humanities credential, where you could possibly do anything, narrowing the possibilities is important. I see from a previous question that you've maybe already worked out some things. How does the current job fare against that list?

Here are some things I'm asking myself as I consider a career change:

If you could change one thing about your current job what would it be? Two things? How many aspects of your current job would you have to change to see yourself being content there?

If you could retire tomorrow, would you? What would you do? What would your schedule look like, now, in a year, in five years?

Do you have other stuff going on in your life that makes you less resilient to the negative aspects of your job? Are you giving yourself adequate rest and recovery time from those negative stressors (at your job and elsewhere)?

When you think about different careers, are they in the same general type of work? (I.e. office work but in a different industry, or programming but a different type.) If you imagine having all the same responsibilities but in a different context does that seem better or does it make you feel trapped and hopeless? Have you considered looking for radically different work, for example, moving from admin work into the trades? If not, why not?

Does some part of you think that by switching jobs you could become a person who likes doing the things that your current self dislikes? (No judgement, we've all been there, I think.)

Special (potentially?) neurospicy section:
Are you trying too hard at your job--are you super invested in making your projects perfect and as a result miss details or deadlines and/or get so overwhelmed you can't deal? Are you saying yes to everything because, technically, you could do it so it feels dishonest to say no? Are you able to take breaks during the workday to rest and pace yourself? Alternatively, are you able to get uninterrupted periods of time to work or are you being constantly pulled from project to project and never get into a flow?

There's no actual perfect job or dream job; any job has negatives and downsides. I feel like the key is in recognizing what downsides are merely unpleasant and which ones will slowly destroy you. It's not easy, for sure!
posted by radiogreentea at 1:30 PM on August 25

Hey this is a really personal answer but I think we sound pretty similar so I hope it helps.

By the time I finished undergrad I realized that it was not a personality flaw that I hated academia; it just didn’t match MY values and my strengths. Until that point I just kind of landed where I was pushed, and because I was a good writer and communicator and tested well I went to college. But I was “bad” at it because I hated writing papers, hated going to class. It all seemed like a lot of fluff with no substance and I hated being made to do something that I didn’t want to do.

When I was in college I got a part time job in a hospital kitchen and spent 3 years there. I enjoyed working so much more than I enjoyed classes. I actually felt fulfilled, I had professional relationships with people of other demographics which I really liked, and I feel like I thrived for the first time in my life.

By the time I was done with college and needed to think about the What’s Next I knew that I wanted a job with these characteristics: on my feet / not a desk job; busy, but not doing the same task on repeat all day; social interaction (because as someone who’s struggled with social anxiety her whole life, I found working relationships to be easier to navigate than personal and my mood benefitted from these interactions through the day); and odd hours, I liked working a 3a-10a shift or 4p-8p or 3p-midnight, it made me brain feel good even though I didn’t understand why.

Nursing was an obvious choice. I have no regrets. 15 years later and I’ve landed in the ER which suits my strengths and my brain very well.
posted by pintapicasso at 2:20 PM on August 25

I asked myself what role did I seem to play no matter what group I found myself in - work, friends, school, special interest group, whatever. This tended to be information organizer/gatherer, distill information into key ideas, facilitate group discussion around decision based on said information. Then I tended to tailor my work related roles to these strengths.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:43 PM on August 25

Jobs should not be about your dreams or what you are into outside of the workplace. Try to figure out what aspects of your work life you like the best, and try to focus on that. Examples for me are my three careers: reporter/editor (this was the dream career) because I loved writing and finding out stories. When that became a dead industry and I got laid off out of it, I went into clerical work because typing at a computer all day is easy and I found myself interested in the niche area I started out in. That had its plusses and minusses (especially when I was thrown out of my niche and into my worst possible job requirements), but clerical-ing is always going to be a thing. I'm currently a trainer because my ability to ask questions and teach people how to do stuff are also areas that my employer turned out to need. If you're a whiz with spreadsheets, you'd find a job where that's useful. Find a job where most of what you do matches with what your skills are.

As for whether or not you do good work and are valued--that depends ENTIRELY on what management you get, regardless of job. I'd probably still be in my old industry had I not had so many changes not go my way with that.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:47 PM on August 25

Have you ever taken an aptitude test ? I was already a programmer and enjoying it when my employer required us all to take one, and my answer came up "programmer" . But my point is, maybe your aptitude isn't matching what you do and that may be part of why it doesn't feel right
posted by TimHare at 9:35 PM on August 25

You might try laughingly describing your perfect job to a friend as though it's utterly ridiculous and then see if over the next couple days you realize ... hmm, actually I think that's a real job called ____.
posted by slidell at 11:01 PM on August 25

I took aptitude and career interest assessments offered by a career counselor. While interesting, and in retrospect fairly accurate, actually landing a job was a different challenge altogether. I ended up conducting “exploratory interviews” with a number of people in my company where it looked like the people’s jobs might be similar to what I would like. This was informative, and also put the word out there that I was looking for a change. Eventually I was tapped for a spot on a technology project, which was the pivotal moment in my career. Haven’t looked back since. It can be done. Good luck!
posted by mama penguin at 2:44 PM on August 26

I think this is it—I just gotta get out there and talk to people. In my previous thread someone mentioned business analytics —would anyone here who works in that field be willing to chat about upskilling and credentialing to move here from more qualitative work?
posted by robot cat at 7:42 AM on August 29