Young people can often have funny and unrealistic thoughts about what their working life is going to be like. Your parents might have had the same job for their entire lives and were perfectly happy, but that doesn’t mean that you too have to pin yourself down to one specific job, career or field. It might not seem like it if you are into a long lasting job, but you can make the swap if you desire it. Here is how to change your career when you are already midstream.
It doesn’t matter what age you are, you should never be afraid to start all over again. You have lots of time to pursue a new dream, and if anybody tells you that that isn’t true, it’s just because they aren’t brave enough to do it. Things will start to feel a lot less scary when you do the research and work out which steps you need to take. Information is key!
Before you pull the plug on a career and set out on a new adventure, make sure that you really know yourself as much as possible. The better you know yourself as a person, the better you will be able to judge if you are just going through a phase, or if this feeling of wanting to start fresh is something that isn’t going to disappear.
The key is to let yourself think about it and dream about it. Your adult brain will keep trying to tell you that you shouldn’t be thinking about such a big change at your age, but if you don’t let yourself be open to the possibility, you will never know how great the next phase of your career could have been!
It’s important that you take some time to figure out what kinds of careers and fields actually fit for you as a person. You might have dreams of becoming a nurse, for example, but if you have one or more young children, that training and those shifts might not be the best situation for your personal life. I would never tell someone not to follow a dream, but at the same time, make sure that you are realistic with your ambitions and circumstances.
Once you have figured out what fits, the next thing to do is try to work out which of your identified obstacles can be dealt with. It might seem like an unwinnable fight to begin with, but when you break things down in to smaller chunks, you will find that there are always answers to most problems.