Looking for success? Try looking for opportunities.
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More years ago than I care to mention, I was fresh out of University and full of hope for an amazing career in, well actually, I wasn’t sure what, but I was still hopeful that it would be amazing. Only it didn’t quite happen like that. Despite my shiny new degree, I struggled to find a job let alone a career.
I eventually started work as an office administrator for a snack food company. It was low paid but it was also office experience, something that counts for a lot apparently. Around that time, okay, time to confess my age, it was around the late 1990s, the worldwide web was becoming a thing in a big way. I began reading a magazine called .Net in my spare time to learn about building websites. I also found myself tasked with being the liaison to a web design agency that was commissioned to build our company’s website. So that is where my interest in web design and development grew and I wanted to be in on it.
My big break came when I applied for a role that was to grow into a web developer’s role. I knew that I didn’t have the experience, but I knew that I had the capability to do this role. Lucky for me, the Managing Director who interviewed me could tell from my enthusiasm that I would be good for the job. And that became the start of my career as a web developer. All it took was looking out for opportunities to get my foot in the door and acting on one that I found.
Fast forward after five years of learning on the job, I landed a new job with a different company and was quite happy. However, I hadn’t switched off email notifications for new job alerts and after I had been in this role for six months, I just so happened to look at one and saw a job on there for more money and within my skill set. No harm in applying right?
Surprisingly, I landed an interview, and even more surprisingly, I found myself walking out of that interview with a start date! I then had to have an awkward conversation with my current boss explaining that I was leaving for a better job after such a short time. Even more awkward considering when I originally applied for this job, they gave it to someone else but as they liked me so much, they created a new role just for me. Yeah, that sucked, but I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity.
