What jobs am I interested in?
by Aroob Shahin Abdelhamid
To figure this out, you need to know a few things: your personality traits, the parts of your current job you enjoy and you do not enjoy at all.
Who are you?
Take a few personality tests. Some of the traits will be pretty vague but they can emphasize some of the keywords that link your personality to what jobs like to hear.
Then, you want to identify what you want your day-to-day to look like. Do you want more structure or more flexibility? Do you want to work mostly alone or as part of a team? Stuff like that.
What jobs match your interests?
After that, search for jobs that fit everything you are looking for. I have found that google searches are really helpful for this. Go to as many job boards as you can to find job titles. If you find a job/title that sounds perfect for you, great! If not, as was the case for me, you can use the job titles that you would most enjoy to search for related jobs. This is an iterative process, and it will take time, and it will also change over time as you learn more and more about yourself.
Once you have done that process, you should have between 5-10 jobs that seem cool to you. Don’t just pick one job or title, because you may need backups!
Narrow it down with informational interviews
Do informational interviews. Use your connections here, or you can also cold-email people whose jobs you are interested in. In my experience, a third respond. Look up how to successfully write one of these emails to ensure high response. Make sure at the end of the call to ask if they can introduce you to someone they think would be good for you to get in touch with.
Questions to ask
- What should you say when you contact someone with a cold email to ask for a job?
- How far can you stretch your qualifications? E.g. do many people who study atmospheric chemistry get jobs in a different geoscience?
- How long does it take between applying for a job and getting hired, and how long should you wait before realizing that you aren’t going to get called back?
- Where can you find keywords to include in your resume for geoscience positions?
- Why get a postdoc over an industry job unless you want to be a professor?
- How much can you ask of a person in your network? Is it proper etiquette to ask them to review a cover letter or your resume for example, or is that reserved only for your closest contacts?
- When you negotiate, how do you justify what you are asking for? For example, if you want access to a room to nurse a child, do you need to prove that productivity increases if support for mothers is available? If you want to get paid more than what a company offered you, do you need to be able to cite salaries from other companies?
- If you live in one state and do remote work, do you operate by the work laws of the state you live in or the state you work in?