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How to plan your career path

How many people do you know who hate their job? Quite a few, right? How many people do you know who complain about their job? You may well be one of them! Perhaps it would be easier to ask you to count how many people you know who love their job. You would struggle to count them on more than one hand I imagine. Unless of course you're George Clooney, David Beckham or Busty St Claire, as they may well have a number of friends and acquaintances with job satisfaction. But you're average Joe, or Joanne is a winger. They grumble and moan their way through their career because they don't get paid enough, or their boss is a git, or no-one appreciates them, or the company is a shambles. We've all been there. Even Clooney must have been holding his head in his hands during the making of Batman and Robin.

So, why do some people get careers they love and others have jobs they hate. For me, it's all about making a choice. A couple of years ago I was in a job I was dispassionate about and I'd been there five years. It was a marketing role with a bit of copywriting, some promotional activity, some web development you know the kind of thing. I would have enjoyed the role a bit more if I had been working for the World Wildlife Foundation, Ferrari or Playboy. Sadly it was a roofing company and I was writing brochures on guttering. I was literally in the gutter.

Over one Christmas break I took a look at the job and considered what was keeping me there. Not much, other than I didn't know what else to do. So, I had a little think about what I could do. I could trawl through the jobs pages and do something similar somewhere more interesting, but that would be a rather hit and miss approach and I may find nothing suitable. Plus, did I really want to do the same thing somewhere else? After all I'd got pretty tired of the corporate mire and helping to line the pockets of self obsessed ego maniacal, avaricious directors. Instead my train of thought centred on two distinct areas:

1. What do I enjoy?
2. What am I good at?

My first list went down on paper: I enjoy writing (suckup!), wildlife, travel, looking at photos. .looking at photos? Don't I mean photography? Nope, because at the time I didn't even own a camera. I just like looking at pretty pictures. Bemused I kept it on the list. The more I thought about it the more I realised that I love the world we live in and I have a passion for experiencing in. The writing, the travel and the enjoyment of photographs were all related and I'd never


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