Caroline Kelso Winegeart of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.,
thought advertising was her dream career, but found the pace and
deadlines so stressful that she switched to a job as an operations
manager for a marketing firm.
Jason Surfrapp
After years of planning, preparing
and perhaps paying for an extra degree, you finally land your dream
job—and discover you don't like it.
It's
a surprisingly common dilemma. The idea of a "dream job" is drilled
into job seekers these days. Increasingly, people expect to find jobs
that provide not only a living but also stimulation, emotional
fulfillment and a sense of purpose. The image of a career as a source of
passion is promoted by career advisers, self-help books and even the
glamorous characters in TV dramas. But fantasies about a job can blind
job-seekers to workaday realities and to consideration of the best fit.
Dream vs. Reality
- Name: Caroline Kelso Winegeart
- Dream Job: Advertising executive
- Reality: Working in the hip, creative office of a big ad agency wasn't enough to compensate for the stress of having to manage budgets while fielding phone calls from media reps, all under intense time pressure.
- Comeback: Focused on building her social-media skills and worked in the field at a smaller agency until leaving for a marketing business. Now runs her own branding and Web-design business, MadeVibrant.com
Told she had creative talent,
Caroline Kelso Winegeart targeted advertising in college, heading the
advertising club at her university and landing an internship at a big
New York ad agency. "This was going to be my foot in the door, to get
this glamorous ad-executive job I thought I wanted," she says.
Her
first job after college in 2010, as an assistant media planner at
McKinney in Durham, N.C., "felt like my dream job," she says. She liked
the people and was thrilled to join an agency with national brands and a
hip, creative image.
But she hadn't
anticipated the complexity of managing a large budget for two accounts,
while being bombarded by phone calls from media reps with ad space to
sell. A heavier work load and more time pressure than she had expected
left her feeling "stressed and so overwhelmed all the time." She had
been naïve, she says, to think that "the place I was working was more
important than my actual role."
Turning a
dashed dream job into a win requires overcoming disappointment, looking
hard at where you went wrong and making the most of the skills you have
picked up. A good strategy is to ask yourself, "Where can I go from
here, to avoid making a complete U-turn?" says Helene Lollis, president
of Pathbuilders, an Atlanta leadership-development consultant. That may
mean using your current job to develop skills and contacts that might
serve as stepping stones to something else.
Ms.
Winegeart liked using social media, so she made building skills in that
area a focal point of her work. That helped her land a new job building
a social-media department at a smaller agency. The skills she gained
equipped her in 2011 to leave advertising and take a position for two
years as operations manager for IWearYourShirt.com, a marketing business
run by her boyfriend Jason Surfrapp. Ms. Winegeart, 25, has since
started her own branding and Web-design business, MadeVibrant.com.
Unexpected
failures can be beneficial if they jolt people into new ways of
thinking, according to a 2011 study in the journal Social Psychology.
People who stop and think deeply about what they might have done
differently tend to be more creative about reaching goals in the future,
the study says.
Some people enter a field for the wrong reasons. Others
become enamored with the seeming glamour of a profession, only to find
the workplace culture impossible. Sue Shellenbarger and guest Ashley
Stahl discuss common missteps and turnaround strategies. Photo: Obi
Onyekwere.
All the plans Ashley Stahl made
through adolescence, college and grad school were to prepare for her
fantasy career in national security, she says. She got a master's degree
in international relations, learned Arabic and networked intensively
for six weeks in Washington, D.C., attending 90 different events. At age
23, she landed a job with a defense contractor to run a program for the
Pentagon. "I was excited and anxious about this huge opportunity," she
says. "I was living my dream."
The work,
however—preparing senior officials for deployment to Afghanistan—had
drawbacks that she hadn't foreseen. She felt isolated in the
male-dominated, intensely competitive culture of military bases and the
Pentagon. The hours were so long that "my job took over my life," she
says. She also realized she had underestimated her aversion to violence.
When her employer asked her to consider traveling to war-torn areas
overseas, she quit after eight months on the job. "By that time, I'd
seen too much raw footage of the worst-case scenarios in the world," she
says.
Change of Heart
- Name: Ashley Stahl
- Dream job: National-security expert
- Reality: She felt her job was taking over her life and decided she didn't want to work in the male-dominated culture of military bases or to travel to war-torn places overseas.
- Comeback: Listening to feedback from friends, she learned her real strengths lay in helping people plan and achieve their career goals. She is now a speaker and career coach.
Working with a career coach, Ms.
Stahl realized she had been ignoring feedback about her real skills from
friends and acquaintances, who told her she was good at helping them
open up, talk about their careers and learn to network, find jobs and
win promotions. She worked briefly at two other jobs, in
crisis-communication and political-risk consulting, Then Ms. Stahl, who
is now 26, quit to work full-time as a Beverly Hills, Calif.- based
speaker and career coach to teens and young adults.
How
long should you stay in a dream job gone bad? Quick departures are more
common in some industries, such as high-tech work, than in others. It
can be fine for skilled employees who find a new job quickly to leave
within a few weeks, says Kathryn Minshew, founder and chief executive of
TheMuse.com, a career-planning website.
But
don't flee unexpected challenges too fast. It is usually better to stay
12 to 18 months to show stability. Also, some people need time to
recover emotionally after a career dream goes up in smoke, says Adele
Scheele, Los Angeles, author of "Skills for Success." She adds, "If Job A
isn't satisfying to you and that's your dream job, you can't just flee
to Job B. You may carry your depression with you."
It's
important to be aware of why you are drawn to certain jobs. A common
mistake is to pick a career without weighing related factors, "such as
culture, management style or the work-life arrangement," says Pamela
Slim, a Mesa, Ariz., author of "Body of Work," a book about managing
changing career paths. "You can be passionate about being a trial
attorney without realizing you have to work 20 hours a day," she says.
Some
people target dream jobs for unconscious reasons. People who enter
sports psychology training programs are sometimes former athletes who
failed to achieve their goals. They may dream of basking in reflected
glory, according to a study last year in the Journal of Applied Sport
Psychology. This makes the work—listening to athletes' problems and
helping them figure out strategies to improve—harder, because the
psychologists can't keep a healthy distance from clients' negative
emotions and problems, says the six-month study of diaries and in-depth
interviews with seven students.
Cheryl
Heisler, president of Lawternatives, a career consulting service in
Chicago for lawyers and professionals, recommends making a pro-and-con
list of all the job characteristics that will affect your happiness. It
may be important to you to have the latest job tools, or to avoid
offices with a party culture, for example, she says. "Any jobs get held
up against that pro-and-con list, and that keeps you honest," she says.
Talking with people who are already working in the job you want can
uncover potential surprises or red flags.
Ms.
Heisler advises recasting your broken dream as an asset in job
interviews. Stress what you gained, such as new skills or insight into
another industry, sending the message: "I got to learn something new.
I'm a different person than I was before."
Write to Sue Shellenbarger at Sue.Shellenbarger@wsj.com
Post a Comment