Career Hopes, Dreams and Issues

[Geordie]

What would be your career goal?

What would be your dreams that you want to achieve in your job?

What would be the issues in terms of employment that you currently face?

Feel free to answer any part, or all parts, of this question.

 

[Dragon's Tooth]

I have always wanted to help people. I want to be a councilor who uses diet and natural therapies to help people. So I have to study counselling and nutrition. I want to help people because I understand what its like to not get the help you need. And I find very few mental health professionals actually have any personal experience with mental health other than their clients so they usually can't help you from the perspective you need.

My main barrier to this is money. My residency status in the country I live in is not such that I can get a small student loan for this. Even though I have a very very large one back in my home country. So I have to pay up front. Me and my husband cannot afford this at present.

My main barrier to getting a job so I can earn money to go back to school is I live in an area of the world where there are many many house wives wanting a job so unless you know someone your probably crap out of luck getting a job. Most part time jobs will have about 200-300 applications in my town. Its so bad I have now applied to work at subway and I'm actually hoping I get the job ... I vowed never to work in fast food again after finishing my first job. Also in the country I live in every bloody job just about needs some sort of "ticket" to prove your qualified. Even an office worker needs it ... I have an IT degree but that is not considered enough ... they want someone who has done the course on how to file alphabetically ...

Oh well I just think maybe I will win lotto and it will all be right.

 

[Geordie]

I have always wanted to help people.

My career goal: I have none. If I do have one, for now, most likely, it would be supporting my family first and foremost. I just want to lay my family members' concerns that I idle around and do nothing, and actually contribute to my family and its bills. After all, who doesn't want a stable roof above one's head (any roof will do), adequate money for transport, enough to have around 5 treats out a year to celebrate joyous occasions, organizing annual Christmas parties, and money to support one's local church?

The dreams that I want to achieve on my job: I do contribute to the company's bottom line, and valued as an employee.

The issues regarding employment: I have no job at the moment. My grades in Uni aren't great, too (I expect to get 2:1).

To Dragon_Tooth: I hope, somehow, you get the opportunity to bag a job, and repay your student loans. Eventually, though, I wish you all the best to be a successful counselor. It will be hard, but eventually, I can see that you will help people. Really.

 

[Dragon's Tooth]

thanks Geordie I hope you get to where you want to be as well.

Though I will say that you need to think carefully about what you want in life. I got pressured into uni by my family and now I have nothing but a massive student loan to show for it. Its so important to do something that will make you happy. you don't want to get to the end of it and loath to be in the career you have chosen. Mind you I had to move to another country, you can find it easier to hear your own voice because your family isn't around all the time (kind of what I did). Family can be well meaning but they don't always know what is best for you.

 

[Geordie]

(Laughs)

My family knows what is not good for me, and I think I understand most of them.

But as for what's best for me, well, aren't there many ways?

Eventually, when I get a job somewhere, in some time, and I give money with a smile to my family, photos of me, as well as the things in wherever I am (be it chocolates, fruits or nice clothes), I will do so while balancing what I can do in my career, as well as what I can do to support my family even further.

 

[ColorfulDreams]

What would be your career goal? President of the United States,or similar office.

What would be your dreams that you want to achieve in your job? Change the world for the better,change the system so its less corrupt,and eliminate US hunger

What would be the issues in terms of employment that you currently face? Well i have a job,but i sometimes space out and stuff,so im scared im gonnna end up gettign fired or something for it.

 

[King_Oni]

In line of the entire "what is your dreamjob" thread, there's a few possible goals I have.

Pretty much all of them are solitairy jobs and require a whole lot of quiet time. I just can't be bothered by everyday trivialities since that'll get me out of my routine.

So basically the impossibility is that I need to be left alone so I can focus on my work. To achieve that I just need to do it a lot. Anyone can technically be a writer or a philosopher for instance.

The big problem right now is that I lack the resources to keep to my solitairy life to focus enough on my skills. It's a bit of a catch 22.

 

[Soup]

@ Geordie: Please be patient with yourself. My own son is working full time BUT not in a career or profession yet. He is 23 & is unsure as to what he ultimately wants to do. Like you, he wants to be a family man but marry some nice woman some day & be a father. That goal alone is helpful in making career decisions since it has to be something steady & stable with fairly regular hours. I've encouraged him to save all he can & travel the world to experience other ways of living, different people & ways of thinking. This summer, he's returning to Europe (with his own money he saved). There really is no rush in your situation. Better to take your time & decide slowly what is right for you than to rush into a career to satisfy others only to discover that you hate what you're doing even if the pay is good.

In college, my son had an English prof who was actually a doctor! His father was a physician of note who'd pushed him into medical studies. On the day he received his diploma, he says, with cap & gown on & degree in hand, he walked down the street to the college he'd really wanted to attend & enrolled in the English programme! He never practiced medicine even for a day. He makes much less than a Dr ever would, BUT he LOVES every minute of his work.

As for me, I'm returning to the classroom in a few weeks. I've taken time away & have been working full-time for my husband's business. He could never work where he had a bunch of colleagues on equal footing or over his head or some boss brow-beating him. Since it's his gig & he's the boss, he decides every detail about how things run & so far, he's done very well. I don't want to kill myself working so if it becomes overwhelming or there is too much social/work politics, I'll decamp & return to what I'm doing now. Thankfully, the kids are grown so I have more options than if I had teens under foot.

 

[Daniel]

I was always jealous of people who had a career/life aspiration as a child, stuck with it, and then ended up doing it for a living. But I bet that in all the classes in all the schools I ever attended, there would only be like 1 or 2 out of 30 who actually did that. Like the girl who loved horses, and had a horse, and ended up working at a stable and being one of those horse people.

It gives me comfort to know that it's common to switch careers if it's not working for you. My dad did that in his twenties. Wasn't happy being an electrical engineer, became a professor. I'm astonished that someone could just do that.

I was always very good at getting good grades in school, but I hated having to go. I did one semester of university living in a dorm, but I didn't want to be there and became really depressed. I took a year and a half off from school and did industrial labour. Eventually, I got it in my head that I wanted to pursue a career in academia and returned to school. Halfway through, I realized that I wouldn't be happy being an academic, so I phoned it in for the last two years and got my degree.

After I graduated, I realized that having a degree, no work experience, a poorly constructed resume and weak interview skills made you quite unemployable! I got a job in retail, and that helped with my people skills. I went back to school for two years to learn business skills while working retail plus doing online work once a week. After that, I spent three years working various temporary and contract positions before finally getting my first full-time job. All along I knew I didn't feel like everyone else, but it wasn't until I was a permanent team member somewhere that I figured out that I really was different in a significant way.

I like my job on the whole. I enjoy that it's a place that recognizes and rewards hard work, and it feels good to succeed when it happens. But in the short time since I realized I'm an Aspie, I've started feeling a resolve to do what I need to do to get into a career that I would really love. I realized that my earlier motivations, when I decided what to go to school for, were more about the person into whom I wanted to change myself. I've felt a profound sense of freedom since my realization, like I'm finally free to be myself!

That being said, I have three aspirations. They're not even career aspirations, they're just life aspirations. I want to teach myself/learn coding/programming. I want to write and publish fiction. I want to to make music and share it online as a hobby.

I've said a lot of similar things in the past, and I haven't done any of them yet, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to put energy into my own interests until I was able to provide myself with sustainable financial support. And I think that getting comfortable with being an Aspie is helping me overcome the last major emotional block standing in my way.

I feel blessed that I've been able to make myself fairly employable! Took a lot of hard work, patience, and accepting a lot of hard truths.

 

[Ylva]

What would be your career goal?

To learn as many languages as possible (at least a couple dozen) and translate texts in them. Write stories of my own. (Christ I miss keyboards.) Do research, endless research; and then hopefully make groundbreaking discoveries, of course, but the point is that I get to read and learn A LOT?

What would be your dreams that you want to achieve in your job?

Be an expert on old languages, fluent in most of them and capable of translating between them.

Write Fantasy and, in time, Science Fiction.

Discover/invent a safe and efficient way to harvest energy, but I have a long way to go before I'm up to date on enough science to be able to investigate that stuff.

What would be the issues in terms of employment that you currently face?

The pressure of a workload does not really bother me, but social pressure does. Wish I were immune to it. Also, kinda wish I were able to lie, even though there is no real sense in it; it is people who should get more honest, not I who should get more DIS-honest just so I can worm my way into their ranks.