Career Confusions:Suze.O comes to the rescue.

The only thing on my mind these days is the “direction” of my career. I graduated with double masters in Finance and International Relations and what I am doing right now has nothing/very less to do with the years I have spent earning those degrees. I work as a financial systems analyst, managing the reporting systems. I should say that not being happy where I am does not stop me from giving my 100% to the job I am in right now. I have learned quite early in my age to do every task/job with utmost dedication. I know I do not want to see myself doing the same job 5 years from now, if I am, then there is something seriously going wrong but on the other hand I do not know which direction to take to keep myself from getting stuck in this job. I have been in this state of flux for the past 6 months. I had this drive in me to excel but I had no clue in what!. I picked up Suze Orman’s YF&B book the other Friday and she mentioned something relating to this problem which made a lot of sense. I have summarized the lessons that I have learnt below:

Do something about it: The most important thing I have learned through meeting people who have excelled in their lives and through reading books is that if you do not like the status quo in your life then “Do something about it”, people can go on and on about how much they hate what they are doing or how much they love to do such and such but if you do not take action to change the status quo then things are not going to change or get better for you. Identifying the problem and taking action are two different things. We need to push ourselves to go beyond the first step.

Do some research: Now that you have identified the problem, the next step is to do some thorough research, I had no clue how to go about this, but again Miss.O’s (not Oprah! it’s Orman) book threw some light on it. Her advice to the YB&F’ers is to pick a career that interests them and do some research on it for at least a week. A thorough research will bring to light the pros and cons of choosing that particular profession.

Make the shift early: If you are in your 20’s or early 30’s making the shift now is much easier now than waiting for couple of more years even if that means settling down for a lower salary. The longer we wait the harder its going to be to make that shift because of the family and financial obligations we might get into. Mr. Scorpio just hit 30 last year and has been working as an IT consultant for the past 7 years. He wanted to get an MBA and make the shift to Finance for a long time and finally he has taken action and is enroute to make that change.

and finally,

Keep the faith: Once we have decided to make the shift or have had made that long waited shift, the initial obstacles might make it tough to ease into the transition and the best thing to do at that point is to keep the faith and have the eyes on the prize. Its more like practicing "frugality", its hard intially but in the long term turns out to be fruitful.



Have you been in situations like these, of so what did you do and how did you make that transition?