The Employment Report

College freshmen have a lot of pressure put upon them that first year. It used to be that when you went to college, you were supposed to explore many different courses of study and spend the first two years discovering where your passions really lie, and therefore what degree you wanted to pursue.

Not in this Henry Ford world. No, students are put on the assembly line in High School, and by the time they hit that freshman year they should be well aware of what they want to do for the rest of their lives and start working towards that immediately. Like I said, there’s a lot of pressure.

If you’re like me, you reached your thirties and realized that the career path you chose when you were eighteen isn’t exactly sustaining your spirit like the school counselor promised it would shortly before shoving you out the door and screeching, “Next!”

Changing careers is extremely difficult to do for most people. The first piece of advice doled out is to go back to school and earn a new degree. That’s expensive and impractical if you have kids, car payments, a mortgage, etc. Most people just don’t have the time and energy for that either.

The best advice is to look at your industry. Is it the industry that’s left you cold or is it your particular piece of real estate in it that’s not fulfilling?

For instance, if you work as an account representative for a clothing distributor and you’re tired of the cold calls and the sales aspect of the job, ask yourself; what got you into the clothing industry in the first place? Was it the sales or was it the clothes?

Odds are it was the clothes and along the way you got railroaded into sales. If so, take a look around and see if there’s a job or career very close to you that isn’t a seismic shift. Far too often people want to switch careers by going too far out of their experience and education. An office assistant tries to be a farmer or a copywriter tries to be a trapeze artist. That’s too far out of your zone and it will be very difficult to achieve the change.

Reach out to your clients and other departments to see if you’d like another aspect of the industry you’re in. Maybe try and become a merchandiser for a department store that buys from you. Or, since you have experience in sales, what about reversing the flow and become a buyer for a chain of stores? With sales experience you have the necessary knowledge and skills to buy product to stock stores.

You’d be surprised how much a small change will accomplish in job satisfaction. There’s no reason to throw away years worth of industry knowledge because your current job isn’t right for you anymore. Take a moment to look at all of the people in all of the different departments you deal with, both internally and externally – maybe there’s something there that will interest you.