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Choosing Your Career Path - Avoiding Rookie Mistakes
Originally By Elaine Zinngrabe
"There's no guarantee of long-term satisfaction, but choosing a field you're passionate about is an important first step."
If you're one of the lucky ones, you're on course for the career of your dreams. You wake up every morning excited to go to work. You love
your job.
If you're like most people, your job pays the bills, but you think you might be happier doing something else. You're not at the salary or
rank you'd like to be at and sometimes you wonder, "How did I get trapped here?"
The answers may be found in your early career choices. There are
certain rookie mistakes that are often observed by the experts and can be vouched for by those who have stumbled or lost their way. Here are five of the most common errors made by people when they are starting out in the work force.
Not having a plan.
Without a clear idea of what you want to do and where you want to be in the long term, you can end up far off the path, and in an unfulfilling job.
"You've got to find the stream you want to be swimming in early," said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based recruiting firm.
By the time they're 30 to 35, most people have found the area they're going to stay in, and it's difficult to switch to something completely different after that point.
"Too many people take the first job that comes up in front of them, and it doesn't work," Challenger said.
This rings true for Brant Cunningham, a 38-year-old Hollywood resident. "There was no emphasis on adulthood or future in my family," Cunningham said. Shortly after graduating from high school, he found he needed to quickly acquire a skill to pay the bills. He went to court-reporting school, hearing that the work paid well. He also completed the work required to be a legal secretary.
But after working as a legal secretary for many years, he finds it a far cry from the more artistic pursuits he'd like to follow such as interior design or acting.
"I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was younger," he said. "All I knew was that I had to get a job quickly."
His situation is common.
"Most people don't spend time to focus on what they enjoy and what they want to do," said Barry Layne, president of Bernard Haldane
Associates. "When you take a job for the sake of having a job, you
lose control."
Taking time off before finding a job.
Don't take the summer or the year off after college. A few months in summer can drag on into the fall. Soon, the time away robs you of
momentum and makes it more difficult to return to work or school, Challenger said. Most senior executives had internships during school that related to their careers and they got started right away after graduation.
Changing jobs too often.
"Job-hopping is death," said Roger Gilmore, owner of Gilmore &
Associates in Topanga. "If someone has skills that are extremely in demand, they can get away with it, but changing jobs every two years or less is a danger flag to most employers."
Gilmore should know. While he now owns his own executive
placement firm, he's also been a dentist, a mortgage banker and a math tutor.
"I wish I'd been encouraged to follow what I wanted to do, instead of what was practical," he said.
Although there is no strict rule for how many job changes are
acceptable over a given period of time, employers like to see that their candidates have a pattern of sticking around for at least a few years.
"The ideal candidate is someone who has had a job for three to five years and is ambitious and eager," Gilmore said.
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