Absolute Beginners

Hello, I'm count von count and this is my new shitflog.

I'm at the beginning of my career-shift. I have yet to decide what I want to do or where I want to go, I just know I can't carry on with my current situation.

"My current situation": I have been with the same company for six years and until last year really enjoyed my role: busy, varied, involved, valued. Following a change of management and a re-organisation I find myself bored, marginalised and reporting to people whom I neither trust nor respect. I could have walked away last year and picked up some free money but bizarrely I fought to win this new role in the re-shuffle, through fear of unemployment, wanting to keep the financial benefits that accrue with long service and wanting to be able to leave when I chose, on my terms.

So now I have a job that is dull and un-fulfilling but which is also easy, convenient, well-paid and has the added incentive of a large sum in free shares if I stick around until next spring. I realise there's not much to pity here but believe me, it's much harder to walk away from a well-paid job than from a poorly-paid one.

I could probably get another job in a similar role for not much less dough fairly easily but what would be the use? Sooner or later I'd arrive back at the same point: feeling trapped and unfulfilled, a few years older and facing an ever-shrinking job market. So I have to take the time to figure out what I really want from a job.

I've never really had a career, a path, a plan. I fell into accountancy by accident and never fell out again. I've always seen work as a means to an end: an effective method of gathering sufficient cash to fund my lifestyle. Somehow, without ever really trying too hard, I've found myself making a decent living. That justification - it doesn't matter what you do as long as you get well paid for it - doesn't work for me any more.

Somewhere there's a job for me that balances adequate financial reward with real fulfillment, stimulus and challenge. All I have to do is find it...

Next time: laid bare by the psychometer; breaking out of the comfort zone.