My Biggest Career MISTAKE - (Don't Do What I Did)

so we're sitting in a coaching session recently with a client who was lamenting some of their career mistakes that they've made and I was sharing some wisdom about what I thought that they should do in certain circumstances this person was stuck in a career path that they didn't really want to do and they felt pressure to do so and I started diving into a story about my own background and it got me thinking that a lot of the wisdom if you could call it that that I pull from is actually based on stuff that I've done in my own past thank you [Music] and I thought it might be an interesting exercise to put together a series of videos of some of the major career mistakes that I've personally made and how I've arrived where I am today so that's what this video is going to be all about this is going to be the first and maybe a series and if it feels right I'll continue to do it but maybe at the end of the day these videos are more for me as some sort of therapy than anything else so one of the biggest career mistakes that I made and this is really the Genesis for this series of videos is this idea of societal pressure and I think I have actually succumbed to it myself and what I mean by that is there is a societal pressure that we sometimes create ourselves that we think we're supposed to play a role that is predefined for us I think back to my own career and how I kind of got started and most people don't know this about me but I started off early in my life I was really into music I was a I played drums and I was playing guitar and I was writing a lot of songs and playing in bands and all this stuff and I had these probably delusions of grandeur that I was going to be some rock star when I grew up in fact when I was asked that question what do you want to be when you grow up I knew I wanted to follow my passion I said that's what I want to do I want to be a musician I always want to a drummer in a band so I was fortunate that I had very supportive parents who encouraged me to follow my dreams and so I applied for and enrolled in a pretty well-known music school and some of my instructors were people that I would see in these magazines that I used to read these drumming magazines and I would have them on my wall like pictures of them on my wall and they were endorsed by my favorite brands of symbols and drums [Music] foreign and here I am sitting in front of them and they're giving me private instruction and it's it's pretty um it was pretty intense and pretty humbling so here I'm in this music school I'm taking classes I'm doing my gen EDS I'm doing all the stuff that I need to do and furiously practicing to try to keep up with this blistering Pace that this school uh provided it was a big challenge but then I had a conversation with somebody who was on a waiting list for the program that I wanted to get into and they were also talking about the amount of money that they would make when they graduated and I'm sitting here thinking about the amount of money that I was spending on tuition and the payout at the end is there was no guarantee I was even going to get into this particular degree program for potentially a couple years here I am thinking to myself I'm going to be a Starving Musician with a very large student loan payment to pay off and so I started second guessing my decision to go to this music school then one day my brother happened to be going to Penn State and as you know I'm a Penn State fan if you've watched any of my videos I'm a big Penn State football fan yeah but there's a reason for that my brother actually was at Penn State at the time I was going to this music school and I would go on weekends to go visit him occasionally and here I would show up at this University this the football games they had this like college town and it was like it was really pretty awesome let's party it was such a such a different experience than what I was getting at the music school which is very small and the issue was in the middle of a a big city and here I'm out in this like like traditional University setting and I kind of got in awe of it and I started talking to some people about what it would what the reality of going to a traditional school would be and I thought to myself well music is truly my passion but I'm not going to make any money at it and all of my peers will be making a lot more money than me when they graduate because they're all going to these kind of traditional schools so I decided to transfer to Penn State and then when I met with the counselors at Penn State and I sat down and looked at what credits would transfer I'd already invested a huge sum of money into the first year of college at this this music school in fact it probably cost double what Penn State did and I was blowing through some of the money that had been saved up for this and I wanted to make sure that as many credits would transfer in so that was when I was talking to the academic advisor they suggested a few different degree programs and I actually had thought that I wanted to go into a marketing program something creative and more in the marketing space But as we were looking through my transcripts we realized that the marketing program wouldn't accept that many credits so I would basically be starting over again and I at the time had thought well I already invested a year into this so I asked them the question well what degrees would I be able to get where I can transfer as many credits in as possible and there was a couple of weird ones that I didn't even know what they were and then one was Labor and Industrial relations and I said what the heck is in the labor and Industrial relations and the academic advisor said well it's like labor unions and like human resources and it's like kind of working with people on the back end of a company and I said well I guess that's okay um I didn't I still still really didn't know what what it was and then I was talking to my mom who happened to work in human resources and she said oh that's like what I do you could work with labor unions you could be a human resource person you can do kind of all these different things and um it would be she's like it would be good for you and I think that that advice was valid at that time but again I still didn't really know what it was I just knew that all of my peers were going to be graduating at a certain point in time and I couldn't fall behind them and if I was to take the marketing program which was my first choice that I would be at least a semester behind everybody else and that was just not something that I could do I had to keep up with the sign of the societal pressure that I created for myself so I started into this degree program and I'm studying it and I'm realizing pretty early and like he's okay I I but I I don't I don't think that I was truly passionate about what I was studying I thought it was interesting because there's some history especially with like labor unions and the employment movements that happened um over the course of years and kind of how we got where we were at that point in time and so that part was interesting and then when we got into employment law and some of these other like comparative Labor Relations I remember having to do research papers about the Labor Relations system in South Africa versus Ireland or something and it was just like hey what am I doing with my life and then I'm looking around all my peers in the program itself in the labor industrial relations program and they're all kind of geeked up getting ready to start their careers because then now we're getting close to the graduation and they're all going off and interviewing and uh this one's getting a job offer with this one this one's going off getting a job offer this other well-known company and I know that I'm supposed to be doing the same thing as everybody else so I'm off there interviewing for these Human Resources jobs and not really sure why I'm interviewing for them to begin with I I didn't have this like deep burning passion for this type of work and I did feel like a little bit of a fish out of water I felt like I should have been doing something else like I was like almost like I wasn't supposed to be here that kind of feeling and again it was all based on my desire to keep Pace with my peer group and make a certain amount of money coming out of college which which in reality is pretty funny because the amount of money I made my first job out of college was probably not much more than a musician would make but at the time that seemed like a really big deal and so sure enough I get my first job and human resources at a well-known a huge engineering company and I start doing you know kind of this thing but I'm I'm working through my early career and again I'm just the whole time I'm thinking to myself like I'm this is not where I should be and somebody if I said I had received at that time was well what do you like about what you're currently doing and I said well there's some aspects of it that I like there's some aspects that I don't like I like some of the employee relations stuff like solving employee problems I like that that component so that was kind of a check and then I liked the recruiting piece the um giving getting people jobs I was always a very rewarding component of it so I kind of boiled it down to those too and as I moved further into my career I kind of narrowed it down to I want to just focus on one or two things and it really ended up becoming recruiting and so I kind of made it a career of talent acquisition recruiting and that's kind of how I got to where I am today and I'll probably talk more about my story in a future video if you think about it it's kind of interesting and a little bit irresponsible because you're being asked to make life-altering decisions at an age that you're probably not equipped to do so and at age 17 when I was declaring my major or declaring the type of career that I wanted to do I wasn't equipped to really think this stuff through and make these decisions that that would have long lasting kind of permanent implications and what I've realized with the benefit of hindsight as I move into the middle part of my career I can look back very clearly and say I was influenced by societal pressure and most of it was absolutely self-created nobody was telling me you need to do this or you need to do that or you shouldn't do this you shouldn't do that or you're going to fall behind everybody else because the reality is is yeah maybe I would have fallen behind by a semester maybe two or maybe a year behind the rest of my friends who graduated and be working but the idea at the time was so catastrophic I can't be one year behind my friends they're going to be working in their careers and they're going to be having these jobs and they're going to be so much further ahead than me and I allowed that to hi Jack my finding my true passion and maybe doing that marketing career path or maybe really exploring the music thing if I could have figured out a way to make that happen but I wouldn't have made the decisions that I made if I could go back in my current version and I know some people will be saying wait a minute you have an entire YouTube channel dedicated to careers and recruiting and how to get jobs and I will say that component of it I'm absolutely passionate about am I a passionate HR person probably not would I do something different if I had the choice probably would if I could go back in time however I like where I am today but it did take me a lot of time and a lot of mistakes in order to get here so what I would say to the person who is trying to make these decisions especially early in their career if you're even in college and you're or in a trade score and you're kind of at a Crossroads early in your career and you're just not really sure what you want to do and you're afraid of the societal pressure think long Hub about the long-term implications of that because the decisions that you make at that point in your life you may not realize it but it will have long lasting and I'm talking 40 plus years of career impact for you but now the current version of he's looking back saying the idea of me losing a year or maybe being inconvenienced by a few thousand dollars in extra student loans to restart from from scratch or near scratch is pretty laughable because AI would have made that up years ago and who knows where I would be in my career today maybe I'd be doing something that I was truly truly passionate about is it a societal pressure that is influencing your decision making and is it self-created so that would probably be the first major career mistake that I made and that one has shaped my entire career not gonna lie but unfortunately that's not the only career mistake that I've made and I've got a bunch more that I'm going to cover in future videos so stay tuned for that but if you're somebody that's listening to this thing and it sounds like me and I'm not sure where I should go I actually do offer some private one-on-one coaching sessions and we should hash out some of this stuff because you could potentially avoid making a similar mistake that I did which could have 40 to 50 years of lasting implication it's really not worth it so you can reach me through my website for that if you check out a lifeafterlayoff.com but anyway if you're interested in hearing the rest of my mistakes make sure you hit that subscribe button to follow along as always appreciate you watching we'll see you on the next one

Channel: A Life After Layoff

Views: 29,052

Keywords: the biggest mistake I've made in my career, career mistakes, career advice, career advice for young people, tell me about a time you made a mistake, how to find the right career, how to find your dream job, how to find your passion, dream career, how to get a job, career advice for 40 year olds, career advice for high school students, career advice for 20 year olds, career advice for 30 year olds, career advice for freshers, hate my job, dream job, how to find a job I love

Id: _rrgav96JIY

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023