“How do you know what to find if you’re not sure what you’re looking for?”; it’s an age old question and it feels like you might have to train to be a yogi to ask it. It can feel like you’re asking for something intangible. But it’s applicable to most things in life, especially your career. In our second workshop we focussed on “Searching for the Right Opportunities” and started off by trying to tackle the uncertainty individuals face when it comes to their primary motivations in the workplace. We asked attendees to prioritise from the options available: more money, pace, more responsibility, new people / new setting, challenge — it took a lot longer for people to decide than we thought it would. “I’ve never really thought about jobs in this way even though I know I should” said one attendee as they considered their choices.
For our workshop attendees, thinking critically about what they wanted most out of their career was tough. We spend the majority of our waking adult lives at work. Typically, we spend more time with our colleagues than with our friends, our lovers and our families over the course of a calendar year. With this in mind, why is there so little introspection when it comes to deciding where to work and what kind of role to do? It could be due to an autopilot mindset where your career is an inevitable consequence of completing education, an economic necessity. It could also be that we’re never quite taught how to search for job opportunities that align with our preferences.
In our workshop we used frameworks to help our attendees remove the biases and false assumptions in their minds when it came to thinking about the right opportunities. In one exercise I asked them to write what their ideal work week would look like. Later we built on this concept of ideals by asking them to list all the factors they take into account when making a decision about career opportunities: examples included the length of commute, the type of commute, the size of the team, travel options and travel destinations. The reactions were mixed. Some found this exercise easy, while others found it harder to dive into detail. The next step was to prioritise those in order of preference. ‘Which were deal breakers, and which could they be flexible on? When assessing these options with objectivity and clarity, can you rank them according to your preferences? Which option comes out on top?’
School teaches us to think critically about important themes in our lives and society — history, politics, literature, science, logic, maths… but when it comes to deciding what to do for work, what to do to give our lives meaning and purpose, we are left to our own devices ushered into the daily grind almost unwittingly. At nuanced, we want people working in tech to be more autonomous by clearly articulating what they want and which opportunities can provide that agency. In the absence of a “school for careers” our workshops aim to provide the skills and tools needed to make effective decisions about your work and life, putting you on a path of fulfillment. Our final workshop in this series runs this Sunday at a beautiful Breather space in Shoreditch, all about “Leveraging your Network”. We’ll be providing our attendees with the tools and frameworks to turn every opportunity into an authentic investment in your personal brand, building the trust and paying it forward. Whether you’re working full time, freelancing, or running your own business we aim to empower you to constantly move forward by tapping into and giving back to the ecosystem of smart, nice people around you. Book here.
