How To Create Your Dream Job (and how I did it 4x)
At some point, you get bored — either with the job or the amount of money you make… or both.
When you feel like it’s time for a promotion or a fatter paycheck, you might face invincible obstacles. Hiring managers aren’t always forthcoming with why you didn’t make the cut, leaving you spinning your wheels when it comes to your career power-ups.
It takes some self-reflection and research, but you can find the green mushroom exactly where you’re at in the game. You just need the cheat code. So, here’s the code breaker guide to create your dream job (and how I did it four times).
Check Inventory
Just like on your favorite vintage video games, you need to know what tools you’re working with. You can’t level up if you don’t have what it takes.
Applied to the career universe, it’s a matter of pooling all your acquired skills (technical and soft), your major accomplishments and results, and any awards and certificates.
Gathering your metrics, awards, and results are likely the easiest to inventory. What is trickier is how your personality, your unique blend of metadata, informs your output. Soft skills are a lot harder to nail down, but they can be the key to unlocking your ideal work level.
For example, you’re a determined type. While you can’t draw a straight line from “determination” to result, you can explain how you have more sticking-power than the average participant and problem-solve better than the rest.
If you’re wondering just how to unpack your personality or soft skills and how they impact the workplace, download the free Soft Skills Translator. Inside, there are 14 of the most common Soft Skills that are highly marketable inside and outside the Retail space.
Research Your Ideal Job
The next step is to research the role you want — whatever it is, what skills, tools, knowledge, experience do you need to qualify? This can look like Googling the role with “job description” at the end. From there, you’ll see current open positions. Open a couple and search for commonalities then turn those into a checklist for yourself.
A couple of things I personally did was to research the career path of people with my ideal job. I wanted to find out what their life looked like in the years and months leading up to this position.
My two sources for this were LinkedIn where you can see their work history; and YouTube (if they have an online presence) and search for older posts (the ones they made while en route to their current job).
Create a Venn Diagram
Remember these from grade school? Yep, you draw two overlapping circles and list attributes you already have in Circle A and what experience or tools you don’t yet know in Circle B . Then in the overlapping space, you write items that pertain to both areas (so the skills you’ve got that already check some qualification boxes).
I did this to show myself how I already possessed some of the key requirements for the ideal job (a little self-validation). Then it was just a case of seeking out experience to gap-fill on the other items on the checklist.
Big Important Note: Women are much less likely to apply to jobs where they don’t check literally every box. You don’t have to check off every single item on a job description. If you believe you’d be a good fit, still apply.
Become Aware of Opportunities
In all four scenarios where I was able to design or step into my ideal work environment, I was tuned into opportunities. When you’re brain is constantly scanning for chances to gain experience in your goal career or move into it altogether, you’re going to spot that opportunity instead of letting it pass you by.
While you could just make mental notes to bump up your awareness, I think it might help to take a peek at how I did this four times. So here is every job I either designed or promoted into:
Event Coordinator
The boss told me it’d be part-time, but I didn’t see it that way. On the spot, during the interview, I built my case for a full-time job. I shared my vision of a premier event space, the only one within 100 miles. I said with the right marketing, we’d be booked solid so she would need a full-time event coordinator. Although I left the interview kicking myself that I blatantly contradicted her, I got the job. And yes, we were triple booked most days.
Store Manager to District Captain of Operations
After around eight years as a store manager, I reeeally wanted to focus more on training (my absolute favorite part of my job). While I was navigating a lay-off, I had conversations about my passion for team building as a trainer and one guy hired me almost on the spot. While the pandemic hit soon after and K-O’d my traveling trainer position, I was still able to lead ops calls and support in other ways.
Retail to Marketing
Maybe it was the sixth lay-off of my retail career that sealed it, but I wanted to move out of retail forever. My passion was writing and I’d been doing it behind the scenes about as long as I’d been in retail.
I started inventorying all my projects and compiling a resume and portfolio, applying to writing gigs all over the country. Finally, I got an interview. I was nervous — I had never worked at a professional agency before.
I surprised myself when I started talking fluently about marketing concepts and best practices. It just rolled off my tongue. I knew this stuff. I had ideas and opinions. I wondered what veteran marketing pro body-snatched me as I discussed metrics, CRMs, and mass marketing. That conversation plus my client endorsements and portfolio was my foot in the door.
I officially transitioned from retail to marketing.
Marketing to Team Leader
I’m not saying a vision board is the key to living your dreams (mostly they just collect dust), but I made one a few months ago that was just career goals. A $6 poster turned into my silent partner, gently reminding me that what I wanted was achievable.
Then, I made it a point to explore the wider universe outside the neighborhood where my immediate job description lived — I played around with larger concepts like where the industry was headed short term and long term and how writers could be ready for it.
That kind of thinking is part of why I landed the role.
So for your purposes, you could graft that concept of exploring the wider universe in which your job lives. Develop your own ideas and philosophies. That stuff is always more interesting to talk about in an interview than “describe yourself in three words.”
Be Splashy
This is Mario’s reserve mushroom you have at the top of your screen, ready to drop at the right moment. It can be the difference between you dying or being able to play the game longer (metaphorically speaking, of course).
Be splashy in this context means, make a name for yourself.
Online, people will call this “branding” yourself, others label this as your reputation, still others might say this looks like networking. I think it’s a little of all of those things. It doesn’t need to be over the top or loud, if that isn’t your style. But it does need to be noticed. If you came to mind, what is the first thing you’d hope somebody thinks about you?
Summary and Conclusion
As a mid-career pro who is looking for the next opportunity, keeping connections alive, being helpful, and publishing relevant content to a LinkedIn, for example, are all ways to show who you are — and give a hint at what it would be like to work with you.
My guiding light is still what my mom taught me: always be upfront. Always be helpful.
Good rules to live by.
When you’re looking to make your next career move, it boils down to a few things…
Be proactive about your own development (don’t wait on anyone to initiate your growth)
Keep some kind of portfolio or updated resumed to show your most up-to-date and bragworthy work
Be helpful, fair, and friendly (it takes you far).
The rest comes down to you being attuned to the opportunities out there and being primed for the next level. Now that you have the cheat-code book of the career realm, are you going to speed-run your next move?