Let's talk about career

A career won’t really promise you big houses, luxury cars, expensive holidays and endless partying. A career cannot guarantee you’ll have a happy live, reliable good friends and faithful spouses. For people like me, my career helps me pay my monthly bills and satisfy my shopping desire; then a certain amount would go to my investment portfolios and savings accounts.

Do I love my career? Well, let’s just say that I’m in this love hate relationship with it. There are things I really love doing and they’re giving me job satisfaction. There are also things that I really hate to deal with but I still have to do it in order to meet my employer’s and customer’s expectations.

One thing missing from my career is that it’s not giving me personal satisfaction. Professionally, I’ve met a certain number of targets I set 13 years ago. Personally, there are many things that I found them hard to achieve because of my own limitations and current job requirements.

Having any career in any industry will bring you to a realization that you’ll be taking almost similar path with your peers or seniors. Take IT as an example. Most System Engineers started as support engineers, then move a bit higher to become Solution Engineers, followed by Senior Solution Engineers. The next position is usually in the management force, be it Technical Lead or Technical Manager. After spending probably 8 or 15 years there, if we’re lucky we’ll be promoted to the C-level positions: CIO, CTO, COO, CEO etc etc…

Not many will make it to the C-level positions. Along the way, some might decide to make a 90 degrees turn and become an IT entrepreneur while some even do something totally different like growing crops or joining MLM to generate 5 figures income by selling corsets, for example.

It all depends on what kind of life excitement and satisfaction you expect from your career. Making career moves is so common nowadays that it doesn’t surprise me a bit when I heard an engineer friend joined herbal medicine business.

So this year I am looking for new excitement, but still asking myself ‘what’?