Ways of thinking about careers – after one week at MRM
Week one down in my new role as Senior Account Director at MRM Japan.
What is job satisfaction?
In the first place, it's very difficult to actually know in advance whether a given career move is the right one. Job satisfaction is a mix of so many things, below just off the top of my head (not exhaustive I'm sure):
affection for colleagues
respect for colleagues’ expertise (not necessarily = 1)
comfort (not purely a positive!)
discomfort (not entirely a negative!)
how valued you are by your peers
whether you're moving in the direction of travel toward fulfilling your own potential
(if yes to 6) how quickly you're moving in that direction of travel
And, to compound things, all of the above dimensions 1~7 may shift (in either direction, positively or negatively) over time. So it's really a mug's game trying to figure out whether a given career move is definitely the correct one.
Right for me vs right for the firm
A framework that guided me in my recent decision was trying to discern the difference between "am I right for the job" and "is the job right for me."
Perhaps we can afford to be more selfish. As “old millennials” who entered the workforce in the midst of the first financial crisis of the 21st century, people my age might have grown too accustomed to feelings of gratefulness for being gainfully employed. I felt that perhaps we owe it to ourselves to be more selfish and demanding of our jobs. “Who is this arrangement right for?” has been a clarifying way to think about this latest career move for me.
Whenever I've made a career change it's always turned out for the positive – and that's a track record in which I'm happy to place some confidence. So, as I said up top of this post that it is indeed impossible to know in advance whether a given career move will be the right one, I have come to trust my own judgement more and more.
If you read this far, thanks for reading. These are not exhaustive (or even particularly well-structured) thoughts on job satisfaction or career strategy, it's just a flag planted in quicksand. A subjective record of a point in time, an honest cross-section of the feelings that happen to be coming to mind at this particular juncture, during a 20-minute stretch on a late-pandemic Friday evening at the end of the first week of a new career chapter.