Finding meaningful work — a traveler’s guide to The Great Resignation.
2021 has been dubbed the year of “The Great Resignation.” Rounding the corner from of the one of the most turbulent years in memory, millions of people decided to quit their jobs in 2021 for something entirely different. It’s a phenomenon that has occurred across every sector and region in the United States.
“We haven’t seen anything quite like the situation we have today,” Daniel Zhao, a labor economist from Glassdoor told NPR in a recent interview.
This unusual sea-change reflects a year in which strained work and life conditions made many people re-evaluate what matters most to them. Some saw how fragile life can be. Others saw needs in the world they wanted to address. Many simply got burnt out during the pandemic shut-downs and decided to change their pace and focus.
Quitting a role that no longer is meaningful to you is one step; finding work that does drive your passions is quite another. A few years before “The Great Recession”, Katie Dahill got a head start on this whole great resignation thing by doing just that.
We sat down with Katie to get some advice for others looking to make a big career leap into an entirely different path.
Define what it is about your current role that no longer fits you.
In 2018, Katie was sitting in a marketing and sales enablement role at a large biopharmaceutical company. It was the third such company in a string of similar roles which she had found largely because past roles had naturally pointed her in that direction. They were good companies, with kind people, but they didn’t excite her in the way that she had hoped her career would.
“I had been working in the corporate world for a pretty long time before I came to Dockwa,” she said. “I didn't feel a huge connection to the companies I was working for — never even really saw them as passion projects. I just felt very much kind of a small cog in a huge machine.”
So Katie felt a general malaise about her work as many do at some point or another in their careers, but she needed to put a finer tip on what was causing that restlessness or risk finding herself in a similar position again. She settled on two characteristics that needed to define her next role.
“I knew that I wanted a small company, and I just knew that I needed a change in focus from biopharmaceuticals.”
In any major career change, there are 1–2 strict filters you should define and adhere to when finding your next role. These should be major categorical changes that will ensure your next experience won’t accidentally mirror your current one. For some it may be role type, leadership, the stage of the company, or you’d be a manager vs individual contributor, for Katie it was company size and industry. By zeroing in on small companies in new industries, Katie had something tangible with which to start her search.
Tell people who know you outside of work.
All too often when we vent about work, we do so to the people who work alongside us. After all they know the context and, as the saying goes, misery loves company. While that may be fine for letting off steam or finding a new role in the same industry, it doesn’t really suit the purpose of finding a new path. Making a major change requires getting outside of your work bubble and talking with people who understand who you are outside of work. For Katie that person was her father.
As she was sorting out what to do next, Katie started in the place where she felt the most clarity about herself: On a boat with her dad.
Katie grew up boating with her father in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. “It’s a place where everything kind of makes sense to me,” she explains. Her love of boating started as a child and stayed with her after she left home. She went on to race sailboats in her spare time and volunteer for Community Boating, a sailing nonprofit in Boston that helps get kids out on the water. Sailing is not just a hobby for Katie. It’s part of who she is.
It was Katie’s dad who suggested she should apply to work at The Wanderlust Group. He used Dockwa, one of the company’s apps, to book slips at marinas when out on the water.
“He called Dockwa for help one day and Michaela [Gaines] picked up. They made this connection and she must have reminded him of me because my dad was just like Katie, this is a cool company, you should look into it.”
As simple as that. No career counselor would have pegged a jump from biopharmaceuticals to boat slips. No colleague could have given that advice, but someone who knew Katie as a person and not just a professional could see it as clearly. As clear as the harbor’s horizon on a cloudless summer day.
Be persistent and flexible.
It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but when you’re making a career leap for the sake of aligning work with your personal passions, persistence and flexibility go hand-in hand.
When Katie first reached out to Dockwa, the role that initially caught her eye was no longer available. She could have walked away at that point, but she didn’t.
“I just knew that everything I had seen about Dockwa really spoke to me in a way that none of my older companies had. So I decided to be persistent. I emailed Michaela back even though the position she had told me about wasn't available. It was through those follow-up emails that I learned about another position on a different team.”
The new position was different than her roles up until that point. Katie’s career had been largely in marketing and sales, this position was in supporting the boaters on the platform. Although it differed from her professional training, it was resonant enough with her personal passions that she knew she’d be flexible enough to master it.
The takeaway here is that pivoting a career to a new direction is rarely tidy. Your background may not make you and obvious choice for hiring managers. The road in may be a little unexpected and foreign. But if you are locked in on what matters to you about the role and company, and you can convey your adaptability to a hiring manager, the path is there to be discovered.
Channel what initially inspired you into your new role.
The goal is not just to join a company or organization that’s meaningful to you, the goal is to do meaningful work at that company. After you land the role, figure out how best to channel your passion in a way that advances the work. Katie did this by making sure that in everything she did, she was the voice of the boater. Beyond taking support calls, she became the boaters’ conduit to the product team.
“ Being the boater spokesperson was something I fell naturally into while I was on the support team because I am a boater and I think I have always been able to pretty easily see it from their perspective. I understand that, you know, you have to cancel reservations because it can be a beautiful day one day and then turns into a squall the next second.”
A lot of the input Katie provides to the product and design teams focuses on the usability of our software on the water itself. When you’re trying to type on a phone or tablet amid swells in the ocean or under the bright sun. Software doesn’t get designed on a boat, so Katie, well she brings the boat experience to the engineers.
When it comes to empathizing with with boaters who call into support, she gets help from a familiar source…
“ Whenever i’m speaking to someone on the phone like this, I always picture my dad. I’m like okay, you know how hard it is for your dad to use his iPhone on the boat. He has to pull down his sunglasses to get to his real glasses underneath so he can read the screen and deal with the sun-glare on the surface. So, I think, that’s that’s just what this caller is going through too.”
Sometimes you find yourself on a career path that feels self-perpetuating. Momentum, otherwise good, can take you farther away from work you personally find meaningful. Whether that’s working for a cause, starting your own business or — in Katie’s case — getting to spend more of her time focused on a passion for sailing she’s had her whole life, it is possible to make a shift.
“I think that I was looking for Dockwa well before I even knew it existed,” said Katie.
The trick is knowing when it’s time to make that shift and how to find your way to the right place for it. Katie has a long career ahead of her still, one that will undoubtedly lead to new roles and achievements at all sorts of companies and organizations. The important thing is that she had the clarity to recognize when it was time for her to shift tracks, and the determination to follow that impulse to a job that worked for her. That jump isn’t always obvious and the barriers will always be there, but for those finding themselves finding themselves part of the Great Resignation of 2021, hers is a good story to examine.
Other stories from The Wanderlust Group:
