Making the big career change

"I'm doing an MBA because I want to change career", I said in my admissions interview just over a year ago. The problem is that at the time I had no idea what I wanted to do I just knew it was time for a change and techie IT roles just weren't floating my boat so to speak.

I was assured that by the end of the year a marvelous transition would take place and any discontent I felt with my career would be replaced with the drive, knowledge and the ambition I needed to progress, not only with regards to my career, but also personally. Now, I'm not an idiot and I'm not gullible, I am in fact the cynic of all cynics to the point where I often become cynical of my own cynicism and enter some kind of paradox so I took this all with a pinch of salt.

So, one year on, where am I now? Well, it hasn't been a miraculous transition by any stretch of the imagination. I started off the year pretty certain I was heading into a career in finance but as time went on it became clear to me that the idea of a job in finance was a lot more appealing than the reality (at the time everyone was getting laid off and the true fickle nature of finance reared its ugly head). The truth is, one of the main reasons people go into finance is the money and excess has never been of interest to me, I'm happy to be comfortable financially but I don't see the need to sacrifice personal happiness for that extra 20%.

From finance I moved to strategy, mainly because I LOVED the lectures and our lecturer was fantastic, I personally found him to be very inspiring but it slowly dawned on me that due to the resistance to change that a lot of organisations have true innovation is only practiced by a few companies. Incidentally, I applied for a Google strategy internship but didn't even get shortlisted. No surprise there.

I think the major revaltion occured when I realised that the type of job I was after was really secondary to the industry I wanted to work in. I decided that working in a creative industry would fulfil my inner 'artist' and my chosen project on the film industry I guess is an attempt to bridge the gap between my MBA and the career I want. Either way I find myself having to make a huge career leap, changing both industry and the type of job.

I certainly can't be accused of making things easy on myself. No doubt the next couple of months are going to be really tough, the job hunt has begun and it looks like I'm going to be starting at the bottom. Not that I have a problem with that, but lets just hope the MBA means I don't have to stay at the bottom for too long!