Dear Readers,
I didn’t plan to be a serial job switcher, in the same way people don't plan to stick around in dead-end or mentally draining jobs. Each time I switched I was convinced this one was for the long-haul. The same way that job loyalists swear that they’ll quit right after their next promotion or bonus.
For most of my life I wore my colourful career like a badge of honor. In conversations soliciting my career advice, I almost always advocated seeking new pastures or seizing the next opportunity, realizing that was most often what people sought anyway, but just needed the external nudge and validation. Besides, speaking from experience it was worth it.
None of this is to suggest that changing jobs or switching lines of work was easy, even if at times it may have felt like the easier way out. Having to repeatedly re-establish myself meant fewer promotion cycles. With lateral and cross-border moves, it often meant having a mentor who was my age, or even younger, if it was someone who had rapidly scaled the company ladder.
I’d be lying if I said none of this was an ego blow. But it was also a reminder of how pigeonholed the professional world can be. There were several times when my skills may have been transferable, but it didn’t necessarily translate into tangible progression, either monetarily or title-wise. Especially if I had gained them in a different industry or market. And while I accept that salary structures and hierarchies are rarely the same, even within sectors, I have seen gaps that were simply too big to fill or justify.
Another curious phenomenon I noticed while traversing careers is our sector bias, something I ranted about several years ago, after moving from the social sector to the corporate world, a transition that is considered unconventional. While any job change undoubtedly comes with a steep learning curve, the boundaries we use to categorize our career world are not as hard-set as we imagine them to be. My seemingly bold plunge back in 2015 was really just a move from an in-house communications to an agency role. It just happened to also be from a philanthropic foundation to a for-profit environment.
While I can’t speak for highly specialized roles, I can speak for the more generalist ones, as I am now on my seventh, and say that a lot of jobs have more similarities than we realize. As an education counselor, I draw on lots of the know-how from the time I spent in corporate communications and as a communications professional, my non-profit and policy background came in much handy. And even though I didn’t make the switches because of these connections, finding them has made the journey, in all its unexpected twists and turns, a tad bit smoother.
Happy reading, reflecting and hopefully not limiting yourself to unwanted career labels.
Yours half-baked,
Saanya