Dream career
I like to share memories of past jobs, like when I worked as a TV talk show host, or glimpses of life at my current job. I’m realizing that a dream career is something that comes together slowly over time; it’s really important to invest in the small steps that make the dream come a little closer. I’m working on it.
In the past year, I got a lot of career inspiration from various blogs– all of which are totally different from one another.
Ask a Manager is matter-of-fact advice for work situations and job hunting; Alison is super responsive to emails on any question you could possibly have. Her ‘magic question’ for interviews really works– my boss was still bringing up “my” question in conversations a year after the interview! heh.
Penelope Trunk is more of a life coach/guru, weighing in on work-life balance and how to find your dream career/life. Her blog is addictive. I took her seminar: “Get your dream job now“. (Sense a trend in this post?) She read all our resumes and gave us individual feedback! Also she got us to test our personality types, which really helped me to understand myself and work situations.
I loved Garance Dore’s post about visualizing her/our dream career. Make that chic dream career.
Recently I bought Elsie and Emma’s e-course, Dream Job. It’s for small business owners, but the advice about branding, social media, evolution, development, etc. is helpful for any career. (And their personal story is so inspiring.)
I joined Alanna Shaikh’s International Development Careers List this year and LOVE it. She describes it is as a “community of people who help each other”– and it really is. You can email your resume and ask for advice, she sends job vacancies to the list and other readers offer advice and even networking help. I’ll definitely renew my subscription. The discussions about international development issues are also thought-provoking. (To be honest, I can’t stand most international development blogs,even though it’s my field. They can be so dry. Alanna’s blog Blood and Milk is the only one I enjoy reading! It’s about public health and I’m not even interested in public health, that’s how good it is.)(Okay, there is one other development blog I like: Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. Sarcasm alert.)
This blog is a space where I’m free to express whatever I want. It’s part of my own visualization of my dream career…
What about you? Where do you go for career inspiration and information? How do you express your career dreams?
pilgrimography 
Ah, this post is so relevant! I’m slowly trying to figure out my dream career as well. Obviously, for me, it would be something creative. I’m always inspired by entrepreneurs and start-up companies. I like this site: http://www.builtinchicago.org
oooo startups!! penelope trunk, who i linked to, was part of a couple of startups and blogs about that often… I love the idea of you working for a creative startup– so cool!
I think something that was important for me to learn once I graduated and started having jobs in the real world, was that the career you want also depends on the life you want. For example, you might love the kind of work you’d do in a certain field, but if it rigidly requires long hours for success and you don’t want that for yourself, that field becomes less of a “dream career” simply because of the time requirement. Or maybe you love the work, but it’s a field where jobs are scarce so most people are very anxious all the time and have low job security, and your temperament doesn’t deal well with that, so this is less of a dream career as well.
Before I had any jobs, I wasn’t thinking about time or environment or many other relevant factors: I was strictly thinking about the work itself, how fulfilling is it, how interesting is it, how creative is it, etc… as if the work existed in a lovely bubble of its own. Yet I think when considering and evaluating careers, you have to think about how it impacts you and your life as a whole. I struggle with this now because I can’t have everything I want, like working with kids and also having a relatively prestigious job– ha, ha. But as you said, “a dream career is something that comes slowly over time,” and that’s true for a dream life.
really good points!! in the next couple of months, i have plans for a blog series about some of my career disasters to-date, involving those factors, remembering my “what i want to be when i grow up”s of younger years…
That’s a great idea for a series. We’ve talked so much about our various jobs and our thoughts as they happened, but being able to look back and revisit them with more perspective, and “package” them into blog posts will really help you (and your blog readers!) to reflect and discuss… and to see how far we’ve come, even though sometimes it feels like we continue to have the same struggles over and over 😉