Your Career is Calling: Five Paths to Job Perfection

This article is the introduction to a five part series on finding your career calling and discovering the five paths to your perfect job.

I love working. Can you believe I just wrote that? Well, it’s true. In my shortish life I’ve managed to find employment at ten companies within seven different career paths. I’ve also studied some serious subjects at university, earned a fancy-dancy degree, and nearly finished a second. Am I ambitious, bored, or just restless? Well, on any given day I’m probably all of the above. But to be honest, I think I just love diversity in my work and love exploring new jobs and career paths.

My hunger for the job hunt is not lost on my friends. I’ve been known to promote their passion, spot their strengths, gather their goals, and nudge them towards the right job network. For some reason, helping others land a job or find their career calling makes me happy and cheerful.

About the Series:

Since I’ve designed and created several job hunting templates for myself over the years, I’ve decided to share them with you in a five part series called Your Career is Calling: Five Paths to Job Perfection. In this series I’ll provide the self-exploratory tools I have found helpful in finding my path to job perfection. The path is not an easy one. I’ve made numerous mistakes, taken a few wrong turns, and stumbled until I found my own calling. I’ve shared these tools with my closest friends and I’ll put them online for you too.

Who Will Benefit?

If you are ready for a new job, a career change, or just looking to land some work this series can help along your path. In particular, I’ve been mindful of the following job seekers, career changers, and work hunters:

1. Job Seekers: You’ve got career experience, but it’s time to overhaul your current position and find another placement in your field. For whatever reason, you want a new job.

2. Career Changers: Been there done that. You’ve worked one or many jobs in a single career path. You’re done, it’s time to change things up and try a new career, a new field. The tricky bit is, how to find a new greener field without going out to pasture?

3. Laid Off Hunters: Perhaps your position changed, the company “downsized”, or things just didn’t work out. Sometimes things happen to give you a nudge in another direction! But which direction should you go?

4. New Graduates: Fresh faced and fresh out of school. How to find a job with freshly minted credentials and little work experience. Some new grads have focused professional degrees while others studied more general academics. What career or job path should be considered?

5. Baby Boomers: You’ve been a baby boomer since birth. Perhaps you are at the height of your career and seek promotion and increased responsibilities. Perhaps you seek more meaning or balance in your work and life. Besides, something needs to be done since all the pimple-faced programmers you manage are off coding in PHP (or some other weird three letter acronym) and dealing with them is a nightmare. There must be something else, something better!

6. Workforce Returners: You are returning to the workforce after an extended absence due to parenting, caring for aging parents, taking a sabbatical, or some other reason, and think you might have trouble getting a job.

So Now What?

Perhaps you see yourself in one of these groups or a combination of several. Either way, I sincerely believe this series can help if you are willing to put some thought into the process. Over the next five days I’ll post an installment each day to set you on your path to job perfection.