Finding the groove that works for you
Doing work that makes you come alive is an incredible thing. My hope is that you’ve seen glimpses of yourself in the personality descriptions above, that you’ve got a solid idea of what career paths fit you.
If you want to double-check your traits and see a personalized recommendation for one of the above career paths, well, check out the fun quiz below. It’ll point you in the right direction so you don’t have to guess!
Discover your personality and find roles that fit!
Narrowing down your options
Don’t get too hung up on picking the perfect path right away—don’t get stuck there. Instead, pick the path that sounds most interesting to you right now, and go for it! Then use that opportunity to narrow down your options until you hit something that makes you come alive.
Careers are best approached experimentally (
here’s why), so experiment. Try things. You won’t know what you like until you try it.
The freeing thing about starting your career with an entry-level job in
sales,
marketing,
customer success,
design,
operations, or
software engineering is you can experiment. You’ll learn as you go about what you like, don’t like, and what you’re really good at.
I started my career in customer service, learned a lot, but knew I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my career. So I took what I learned and went into entry-level marketing, built different skills, and have been able to continue building my career toward the things I love. This process has given me so much of a better understanding of what makes me come alive—and anyone can do it.
You’ll pick up so many skills and experiences along the way that help you immensely later on. And you won’t have to stay where you start—you can continue the process of experimentation and narrowing down as you go.
Beyond my personality, do I need to build skills for companies to want to hire me?
You bet—but in our day and age (with remote learning and so many free resources at our fingertips on the web) you can easily learn them! Jan Aclan, a marketing associate and team member involved with hiring at PandaDoc, a startup, told me:
The most dangerous, potent, and successful sales reps at PandaDoc aren’t just gritty and good on the phone. They know the tech stack. Better than their peers and managers in some cases. But before that, they were tech savvy and willing to learn. Now, they can identify untapped value within the CRM, segment audiences when cold calling, and overall better control their own destiny.
This applies to all roles! Building the software toolset will level you up immensely and help you translate your talent into skills the workplace needs today.
Once you know which career path would be a great fit for you to try, start building skills by teaching yourself several of the software tools that are associated with that role.
To get you started, here are links to some of the most popular software tools used in each of the roles I mentioned above:
Next steps
Odds are, if you’re on the job hunt right now, a handful of the above mentioned roles sound interesting to you! If so, awesome.
Check out
these ultimate career guides. They’ll give you practical ways to start your career in entry-level sales, marketing, customer success, operations, design, and software engineering. Or, click on one of the images below:
