Employment Tips
What do you care about? The answer to this question will tell you in which industry or sector you should be working to give your career meaning and help keep you self motivated. Some examples: you may care about protecting the environment; helping the underprivileged; providing medical care to sick children; maintaining wildlife diversity; educating retired people on their statutory rights; or spreading your religion to the whole world.
This doesn't mean that you will necessarily have to change career. If you are an accountant, and like being an accountant, but you want to do something to help protect the environment, you can work as an accountant for the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). If you decide that you want to change from being an accountant to being an environmental scientist, then you will have access to environmental scientists who will be able to point you in the right direction for training, mentoring and who will be able to explain exactly what it is they do all day.
You may decide to stay an accountant once you have a realistic close up look at the career of an environmental scientist, and feel you will be better suited to helping the environment doing what you have experience, training and skill at doing. Or you may realize that you were meant to be a scientist, and that you have learned a lot of useful and important skills that will transfer very well to your new career: your grasp of statistics, eye for detail and process, nose for sniffing out solutions to tricky complex convoluted problems, and your ability to work with a wide variety of people at different levels of an organization.
Only you know what you really care about, and nobody can teach you care about anything that you don't care about. I have often said that I could teach a monkey to fix a computer, but I'm not sure that I could get him to care enough to really be any good. Do you want to be a monkey? Neither do I - that's why I chose a career that allows me to do what I care about, every day. It helps to get through those days where the work is not exactly as satisfying as you'd wished, when you are doing stuff that you'd really rather leave till tomorrow. Caring about the end result and reason for your work is the motivation to do the inevitable stuff that is not fun, not recognized or rewarded, boring or unpleasant. Caring will help you to get on with it with a smile in your heart, if not on your face!
