Do you feel you’re just getting to work each day and just ‘working’ your butt off? If that job were your dream, your true passion and your calling, you wouldn’t be ‘working’. You’d be having a ball, enjoying each minute, learning and growing along the way.
Do you feel like you’re stuck in a bad job and you’ll never achieve that dream? Well, here are 12 ways to convert your current job into your dream job:
1 – Do A Self-Assessment
Self-assess your values, your work methodology, the kind of work culture you are comfortable with and the kind of work you’ll do even for free. Now map this knowledge to what’s required at your dream job. Will your dream job give you a degree of satisfaction over whatever you’re doing right now?
2 – Recognize Where Your Passion Lies
Look around your current work place. Are there jobs that interest you much more than what you’re presently doing? Does your passion lie elsewhere? Identify those jobs and list them out. If you have too many jobs on the list, ask yourself if you’re just listing everything other than your current boring job or if you’re truly following your passion.
3 – Get The Job Descriptions
Find out the job description for the jobs you’re interested in. The best way to do this would be to approach Human Resources and get a detailed JD for each role. HR might want to know why you’re interested. Don’t let on that you feel you’re in the wrong job. Just let them know you want to know more about the different jobs in the organization.
4 – Find Out What You Need To Train In
For example, if you’re in marketing now and it’s not really ringing your bells, and an HR gig is more you, find out what courses you need to take. Would you need to go back to school for it or can you leverage your existing people handling skills, do HR training on top of it and be ready? Know all the details.
5 – Find Out If Further Training Is Feasible At This Point
If you’re already knee deep in your current job, taking up additional courses at this point may not be feasible. In that case, you may have to ponder taking an unpaid leave of absence during which to do your training. You will also have to consider your finances, availability of local training options and so forth.
6 – Convince Yourself
Don’t be deterred by your lack of experience at this point. All of us have the relevant experience in some form or the other; it only requires a different perspective to point it out. If you’re confident that you can pull it off in HR instead of marketing, then the rest is up to you.
7 – Prepare A Targeted Resume
Consider how your current talents, experience and skills apply to the responsibilities that go with the new job territory. Go over your entire education, career and personal experience with a fine-toothed comb and bring out all those details that are relevant to your chosen field.
8 – Put Together A Promotional Folder
Get letters of recommendations from your clients that highlight your empathy, your knowledge of project management, smooth client handling, your level of information technology know-how and so on. Write down summaries of the skills that apply to your new job. Add other documents to the folder such as contributions as camp counselor, or school president and so on that are relevant to an HR post.
9 – Sound Out Your Management
Most companies are happy to retain their existing talents, in some capacity or the other. Of course, for this, your management must see you as a value-add in the area you’re targeting. When you go prepared with a promotional folder and a targeted resume, your management will be impressed enough at least to consider your request.
10 – Make An Offer
Here’s an idea: make an offer to work in the HR department on weekends and after your work hours, for free. As long as this doesn’t affect your performance at your current job, it shouldn’t be a problem. Plus, which manager can say no to a free worker? This is a low risk trial, both for you and your management.
11 – Use Everything You’ve Learned Till Now
Shine at your secondary free job and impress the boots off your management. The important thing is to not let any of your previous efforts go waste. Use every bit of knowledge and human relations expertise to board with you. If you really think about it, we can pretty much use almost all of our current experience just as well in another field.
12 – Keep Your Expectations Realistic
You will have to let go of your seniority and start lower at your new job. Have realistic expectations. That means lower pay and more menial work. Then again, no job is perfect, not even your dream job. All things worth having require some effort.
About the author: This article was contributed by Dean from Invesp, a conversion optimization services company that helps businesses improve their average online conversion rate and optimize their landing pages. Invesp also offers a large number of free landing page templates for marketers that can be downloaded under creative common license.