i hate my current job but am too inexperienced to try something new

how to explore potential career paths with the experience you have, not the experience you *think* you need

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I’m 1 year out of my undergraduate degree and I hate going to my current job in research. I’ve always been the do-good student and I think it’s led me to a field that I have no passion for, and I’m not particularly good at. I’m afraid to take a leap because I’m not experienced. What do you recommend I should do?

- Anonymous

Take the leap! Take the leap!! If the only thing holding you back from taking the leap is fear, take the leap now. But if you have larger hesitations about leaving your current job that you hate—maybe you don’t know what you would leave your current job for—I recommend committing yourself to a solid 3-6 months of career exploration and ideation. This period serves two purposes: it will help you learn more about the world of work and establish some familiarity and comfort with the “leap” so that it becomes less daunting.

Here’s what you do:

1. Go through every single job/internship/externship/club/extracurricular/volunteering/significant activity you’ve done in your life and list out (a) what you liked about them and (b) what you disliked about them. What you like/dislike can be anything—skills you used, qualities of the people with whom you worked, level of interaction with others, even just “free food” or “made lots of money.”

2. Make a list of 5-10 work-related experiences that you really enjoyed, e.g., projects that you found fulfilling and valuable, particular tasks that you enjoyed, activities in which you achieved flow (the sense of being fully immersed and energized in the process of doing something). These work-related experiences don’t have to be actually at work—but they do have to involve work. As much as I enjoy the experience of watching anime, “watching anime” did not make my list of peak experiences because I don’t consider it work and don’t want to make it into work. However, “watching anime” could be on someone else’s list if they, for example, regularly watched anime and wrote reviews of episodes on a blog or YouTube or something.
   
   And don’t beat yourself up if none of your favorite work-related experiences are in your current field—when I did this activity, the only law-related experiences I had were “studying for the LSAT” (lol) and “recruiting and networking” (also lol), neither of which are substantively related to the law. It turns out I just really like learning and socializing, which can be found in a legal career but also can be found in many careers outside of the law, too. And most of my favorite work-related experiences predated my entry into the formal workforce—middle/high school activities routinely topped the list.

3. Take a hard look at your likes/dislikes and brainstorm possible career paths that contain your likes and minimize your dislikes. Share your list with friends, professors, mentors from previous jobs/internships, online forums, etc., and see if they have any suggestions for you. Don’t rule anything out at this point yet—the more, the merrier! Entertain the wealth of possibilities that your life holds.

4. Make a list of roles and/or organizations that your possible career paths can start at. Product Manager at a tech company? Nurse at a hospital? UI/UX design for a bank? Screenwriter? Just list them all out.

5. Conduct informational interviews with people who work in the roles and orgs you brainstormed in Step 4. This part is probably the most time-intensive and laborious, because you likely won’t know a lot of these people already. This will take a lot of cold emailing and involve a lot of no-responses. (And here’s my video about how to write a cold networking email.) At the end of every informational interview, don’t forget to ask them if they have any other recommendations for people whom you should talk to in order to learn more about a particular role/industry/organization. You may not know anyone outside of research right now, but this is how you start knowing people outside of research in the future!

At the end of this career exploration and ideation period, you should have a clearer idea of some paths you’re interested in taking next or jobs that you want to apply to next. If not, then it’s a sign you need to conduct more informational interviews—there does come a point with informational interviews when you’ll start to feel that you have enough information and are experiencing diminishing marginal returns with every informational interview you conduct.

As for hesitating to take a career leap because you’re “not experienced”—remember what you did in Steps 1-2? You have so many experiences to draw from when interviewing. They may not be directly from your job, but who cares? Experience is experience. Negative experiences are experience. If you give yourself the grace to expand your definition of “experience,” you’ll likely find that you are, in fact, much more experienced than you initially thought. ◆

Additional resources for those contemplating a career change:

• Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

• Odyssey Planning on edX

• Designing Your Career on edX

• A reputable career coach (I was a huge skeptic but ended up loving mine so much that I’m planning on apprenticing under him this upcoming year!!)

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