Stop being bored with your job!
Life isn’t set in stone
How did we get here
I’m willing to bet that the majority of you who got college degrees took the best job possible out of college. Even if you didn’t get a degree, you likely found the best job you could. When I say “best” I mean this based on your own personal parameters (e.g., pay, time-off, culture, fit). Fast forward a few years and if you are like me, you start to feel stuck. You want to advance your career, but you no longer enjoy the type of work you are doing. Even worse, you may never have enjoyed your work!
How to change
Thankfully, you don’t have to stay in the job, industry, or function that you are currently in. I moved from the automotive industry as a mechanical engineer to the quasi-medical device industry as a software engineer. If you know anything about engineering, that’s definitely an atypical move! Ultimately, I was tired of doing my job and wanted to do something different. I always enjoyed my software classes in college and wanted to pursue that further.
Don’t get me wrong, this was not an easy transition. The hardest part was finding a company that was willing to take the risk of hiring a software engineer without formal training. I had to put in a lot of work to feel confident in the hiring process. This included a lot of studying and brushing off old material from college. Based on the job description I even went as far as getting a high level understanding of the language that was primarily used (ultimately a waste of time).
In the end it worked out wonderfully! I must have done well in the interviews, because the company decided I was worth the risk. It helped that I was willing to move to a small rural town where software engineers are tough to come by… and I was willing to take a pay cut for the opportunity. I have found these types of sacrifices are sometimes, but not always, necessary to break into that new field.
So what
There’s no need to go through life unhappy with work. Of course if always getting higher pay and advancing the ladder is what matters, then you might not like the work you do and that’s okay. For those of us that want to try new things and find something that we love, risks are necessary. They won’t always pay off, but the learnings that come from the new adventures are always plentiful!
