Career Peace

If you’re in the middle of a career change, you live in a world of upheaval. It’s not easy to change the way you’ve always made a living for yourself. Especially if you’re well entrenched and relatively successful at what you’re doing now. I found this bloggar who put the emotions into words extremely well. Perhaps you can relate…

I stumbled upon a blog called A Mind of My Own. I’m not even sure who wrote it. I couldn’t find the bloggar’s name anywhere on the site; only the alias of WishBone.

Anyway, it got my attention. Not just because it contains a post about changing careers, but specifically attempting to move out of the Information Technology sector into something totally different. Problem is…to what?

Once you’ve been in IT for as long as this poor soul has, and deeply desire to do something else, where do you start? Here’s a quote from his (or her) post that I think captures the emotion of a software developer who is either suffering from career burnout or real close to it. Take a look…

Been thinking of career path change these days. Totally got sick of doing programming and no value add to myself. Besides spending money on a degree that I don’t know will get but hope to get, I haven’t been updating myself ever since. I feel outdated with the fast moving programming languages. Java, PHP, ASP are so old news. Now, there’s AJAX, XML, and whatever is currently being used or tested online….

In addition, I feel stupid. Slow. Moody about my current choice. I ask myself again why on earth I took this up. Either I’m suffering from some depression about work or I’m tired of doing the same thing and unhappy about being value-less besides being able to document, staple, get user sign-offs, etc.

I’m so into the getting out of my current scope. A career change is not easy. Nobody said it was. One has to uncover the possibilities, plan and consider that the skills are transferable. This is getting more depressing.

Take heart, WishBone. You’re not alone. As a matter of fact, you’re not even in the minority.

I’ve faced the same challenge, myself. I’ve been writing Microsoft code here in the Atlanta area for 12 years now. I know a lot of people, but they’re all programmers or database administrators. And therein lies the problem.

Because programmers are an introverted lot, we tend to hang with our own. We’re the innovators in the technology field. And even though we don’t always seem like it, we do make great conversationalists…as long as you’re willing to talk about object-oriented programming techniques or Microsoft’s latest MSDN offering.

And I think that’s the problem. The Bible is right. No man can live as an island. Yet, too often, we programmers try. It doesn’t work. God didn’t wire man that way.

WishBone is right. Changing careers is hard. But if you’re going to do it, you’ll need help. Help that must come from outside your own circle of friends. What we have to get good at is making that circle bigger. And that means getting out of your comfort zone and forging friendships and acquaintances with people who have nothing to do with IT.

This wasn’t easy for me to do. But I made a concerted effort to do it. And when I did, I found something I didn’t expect to find: not only was making a career change a lot easier, I was a lot happier as well.

Tags: Career Change, God and Career