Career vs Job — A Passion Debate
Photo Credit- Jobberman.com
Try asking yourself, what is your Passion? A Career or A job? If you found out an answer, try asking “Are you following your passion right now?” — Surprised with your answer? No worries, as first of ALL, we have ALL been there!
Career vs Job — One might think that the two terms are equal and could be used upon individual preferences, but there is a difference between having a job and having a career. “Attitude” — Yes, it is the real difference. A career would have a natural evolution, not only to get the job done but also to learn valuable skills, gain experience, build the professional network and continue in the field earning promotions and raises within a company. Whereas a job is something which pays the rent, we might not even aim to achieve anything more than what is really needed or expected out of us. We solely focus on getting the job done, without really being passionate about it as at the end of the day, paycheck matters.
People say that money is not everything, but we would be more comfortable in a car than a bus or a public transport. The real key to happiness is doing what you love to earn money. Only a lucky few in this world gets to have it that way, but surely, you can find something that you are passionate about in what you do to earn a living. If not? You need a career change. After all, that is what I did.
I started my career as ETL Tester and later down my career path, I took a watchful decision to have career change and become a Software Engineer [ETL Developer]. I liked to code, so solely followed the path that could take me there. The domain that I worked for the time, organized a competition to fine tune our existing ETL queries and surprisingly, needless to say, our team has contributed for more than 1 million USD savings in 3 months’ time and at the end of the day, I found out something that I was passionate about. While I continue with this career, I was faced with a decision to pursue something that I no longer was aware of — That is to migrate applications to Big data which I was hearing for the first time without knowing any real benefits. At first, I had second thoughts, but believe it or not, we had migrated 20+ applications and our team was the first team to migrate the noted applications in less than a year time and resulted in more than A Million USD savings. Sooner than I expected, I became a Senior Data Engineer and started to play a huge role in migrating applications to Big data/Hadoop.
Wait a minute! Did my passion change over time? Making your career means that you continuously must take risks to make your dream work and today I am a passionate Senior Data Engineer that could proudly look back at the choices I have made.
Chasing your dreams and taking risks to do what you love, is never easy but I have learnt that, at the end of the day, it is worth it.
Here are few more reasons to show you that following your passion is more important!!!
Monday thoughts: -
The very first thoughts that enter your mind on a Monday morning could solely determine how passionate you are about your career. Make sure you are doing something that could make you jump out of your bed on a Monday morning.
Be motivated to work hard: -
If you are passionate about what you do, it’s not a problem to work until late hours because you don’t feel like you are forced to do it, which makes the experience that much more enjoyable. Every industry has a busy season, so you had to put more extra hours.
Always be creative: -
Your creativity will die when you are stuck doing a dead-end job which you are not passionate about. On the other hand, if you have taken your decisions wisely, you would continuously look for and find better and easier ways to get your job done, with your creativity.
“If you don’t love what you do, you won’t do it with much conviction or passion.” -Mia Hamm
