Career planning

Introduction

The Alarm buzzes and it's 5 am. Do you jump out of bed, excited to face the day, or do you hit the snooze until the very last moment, dreading the day looming before you. If your answer is the former, count yourself lucky. Most people don't have a job that they like, let alone love. I've even heard about people who get physically and violently ill because they hate their job so much.

I've been there. I worked my way through my first year of college flipping burgers at a popular fast food chain. Believe me, nothing screams career like scraping out a half dozen five gallon pails of grease with a spatula, into a recycling bin at 8 o'clock in the morning. There is no other smell like it in the world. Throw in a hangover and you can only imagine the total career satisfaction you experience.

After that experience, I stumbled accidently into a job working for a small engineering firm, which led to the next job drawing plastic parts for a automotive supplier. I had a career!

But was it what I wanted to do with my life?

That question was one I couldn't answer. How, at the age of 20, could you possibly answer that question. Life is simple at the age of 20 because you haven't had the opportunity to figure out just how freaking complicated life gets all on its own. However, this isn't about my life story, this is about helping someone else avoid the pitfalls that I, and so many other people, fall into when your faced with that immortal question: 'What do I want to be when I grow up?'

Funny how by the age of 30 I still couldn't answer that question. At 35 I needed the answers. I needed them bad. Life was passing me by and I had no idea what my final destination looked like, career wise. So, I began to ask questions of people I respected. I began to read everything I could find on the subject of career planning. I thought long and hard about it for years and played with different tools to help me do what I wanted to do.

Over time, I developed a process that help me get to the answers I sought.

Since then, I've helped a lot of people, friends, co-workers, and people I have had the privilege to lead alike, to figure out how to be excited about getting up in the morning. You can not imagine the rush that I get when someone comes up to me years later and tells me what a difference I made in their life.

So, that is what this blog is going to be about. It's about helping you to find your way in the big bad business world, finding a job that makes you happy, and finding your own answer to 'what I want to be when I grow up'.

I hope you find it useful, if nothing else, it should make you think.

copyright by the author, 2009.