The Career Change Soul Search

Times are tough and the job market is over-saturated with applicants. Many believe just having a job—any job—is better than sitting at home watching the bills pile up. Others take the opposite view: you only live once and you might as well enjoy the journey and follow your dreams. This blog is for those souls who don’t like the direction their career is going, people who think it’s time to shift gears and follow a different career path. For these individuals, I suggest the career change soul search.

Sunday

We’ll start with how you feel on Sunday nights. Do you dread starting the work week? Do you find yourself snacking or having one too many drinks that night to erase the pain of Monday morning at the office or plant? If you had to take work home with you on Friday, did you finish the work? Did you make at least a “dent” in it?

Monday

Do you find yourself caring less and less about Monday morning staff meetings? Safety meetings? Schedule meetings? Do you avoid them if possible? Find it hard to stay awake as your boss or supervisor addresses the week’s assignments, priorities and target tasks? Are energy drinks like Red Bull and Black Mamba your new best friend?

Tuesday

Is Tuesday becoming your new Monday? Where you’ve only just begun to finish the work you should have completed on Monday? Do you find yourself asking your co- workers what the boss talked about during the Monday staff meeting? Do you ask for copies of any handouts you should have gotten during these meetings but somehow misplaced them?

Wednesday

Do you dread your boss poking his/her head into your cubicle or work area to ask about your progress? Do you find yourself falling behind on Monday and Tuesday’s workload? Do you decreasingly care what your boss thinks and wish he/she would just go away? Do you do a lot of web surfing when no one’s looking? Or find yourself checking out job postings and job descriptions of other career fields? Do you celebrate a bit too enthusiastically the week’s humpday? Do you leave right at 5 p.m.?

Thursday

Do you find yourself wishing it were Friday? Are you falling behind on your weekly work assignments? Don’t care if others are done with theirs? Have you lost your will to compete? To stay sharp, to learn new skills, procedures, techniques?

Friday

Is this the one day you dread the least? Do you make a half-hearted effort to be on time, arrive at work engaged to a degree and even try to catch up on the week’s assignments? Do you take a long lunch celebrating the end of the week? Do you stay late, showing the boss that you don’t want to be let go just yet?

If this sounds like you, it’s definitely time to make a career change. My advice: work a little harder at your current job to last long enough to learn a new career and succeed in its pursuit.

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