Back to Basics

When you’re a generalist and looking for a career move, job-hunting is like starting all over again. It has become so much more than just searching for a new job – it has been finding a new purpose, re-evaluating my life, revisiting old goals, redefining new goals, and thinking about what Future Alex would want from life.

When you’re a child, you’re always asked what you want to be when you grow up. I’m fairly certain I once said I wanted to be a ballerina. I know at another point, I said I wanted to be an orchestra conductor. Later on in life, this becomes a more serious question as you choose your school subjects. I know that none of the subjects I chose in school have sent me down a career path. I thought I was going to become a doctor at some point based on my subject choices and I did become Dr Alex but not a medical one. I’m now a grown-up and I think that question of ‘what do you want to be?’ is still pertinent and will still be pertinent for Future Alex in ten years. We change and our dreams change. Although the ballerina one maybe hasn’t changed too much based on how often I still attempt pirouettes in my living room.

In late January when I decided that I was now on a ‘sabbatical’, I started this process of going back to the basics of what do I want to be. It involved breaking down the process of how I got to where I was, how I lost the path I had set myself, and when I stopped setting goals and dreaming. The last goals I remember setting for myself were to get a PhD by the age of 30 (I submitted for examination just before my 31st birthday if that counts) and to become a public representative. The latter I became disillusioned with from working in politics. After the PhD was done, I had nothing except that I wanted to be a mom and that hasn’t happened either. I was in a rut and then a job I didn’t necessarily want but needed came along and I no longer had the time to think about what I wanted from my career. Four years later, I now sit here and have to start all over again.

At first, I felt like I had wasted so much of my life and was purposeless. Then I realised that it’s never too late and there’s no better time to do this process than now. The only useful piece of advice that my PhD supervisor ever gave me was that no work is ever wasted. It was time to look at all I had done and how this could be put to use.

As I said in my last post, I had to tear down my broken system and build it back better. After a tough year professionally and health-wise, this was a mammoth task. I had to unlearn all the negative self-talk, build up my self-confidence, and find what brought me joy again. I needed to reflect on why the previous year was so tough professionally (toxic environment aside).

Two things helped me through this process. The first was a LinkedIn Learning course by Alessandra Wall from Noteworthy on Articulating Your Value. I did this one when I first started working on my CV again because I was struggling to capture everything that I had done over the past three years. In the course, Wall says to look at a matrix of your skills and what brings you joy at work, as well as what you dread doing. In positioning yourself, there is no point in highlighting all your strengths if you dread doing that type of work. You also need to be able to articulate how your skills can be put into action and the impact they have. I realised that I had spent a year not putting my skills into action and this is why I had felt so unfulfilled professionally. It was back to the drawing board to figure out which skills I have, which skills I don’t and would like for a possible career change, but also what brought me joy in my previous professional experience.

The second thing that helped me in this process is this app, Bloom, which uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) techniques. It has become part of my daily routine now and if I ever need a quick therapy session for some motivation or to overcome some anxiety, it’s always there. I could dedicate an entire post to how Bloom has helped me but in this particular instance, it was about setting daily intentions and manageable goals for myself on this job-hunting journey.

In February, I went back to the basics and started setting small, manageable goals each month both for my life and work. There are also some big goals on the agenda, but I have realised that you have to work on those smaller, basic goals to reach the big goals. For example, February's goals were to work on my value proposition for my CV and explore what skills I should possibly gain through an online course to improve my CV so that I was less of a generalist or at least a generalist with added value. By March, my CV was looking completely different from anything I’ve ever submitted before, and I was enrolled in a Futures Thinking specialisation on Coursera that is taking me on a path that I am really enjoying (check it out here).

So, what do you want to be? Go back to that basic question and start putting in small goals around it; whether it’s looking at how your skills fit that and if they don’t, what you can do about it, or whether you need to choose a new path entirely and set some goals to get you there. And don’t be afraid to write it all out. You could plot it out on post-its, in a notebook, on your phone, or wherever! I still haven’t fully answered this question myself but I’m chipping away at it, small goal by goal.

Alex the Generalist

Originally published 11 April 2022