I changed my career path in 30 days

I landed three jobs in a row that I wholeheartedly loved. I've talked to so many people who, 10, 20, even 30 years into their career, can't say they've ever had a dream job. Sure, you may have had good jobs and you may have been very good at those jobs, but it may have never been anything that lights you up, feels meaningful, or actually energizes you instead of deflates you. How did I land three dream jobs? Well, I'm telling you right now, it was not luck. And I, it was not chance. While some people are very fortunate to stumble into what they want, I was not willing to wait around for that. I knew I wanted my career to have a massive upward trajectory with earning potential, tracking ahead of what others said was possible. And this is how I was systematically able to figure out exactly my career step and uncover three roles in a row that grew my career quickly and, and made me the happiest I've ever been. If you're new here, this is self made millennial. I'm Madeline Mann, a human resources leader and job search strategist. You may have seen me in these places. New videos on Thursdays. Now stay to the end because I will reveal how I took a big pay cut for a job that I knew would change my life. After coaching thousands of people on how to find the right career and pivot into it quickly, it's become very clear that the way that most people choose their career path is often one of three things. One, you take an obvious career that family members have guided you to, or what I call TV careers, which are about the same 12 jobs that every TV character has. Lawyer, journalist, teacher, so on. Second option is you stumble into your job. The job sounded interesting, so you applied and bing, bang boom, ten years later, your entire existence is focused on creating endless decks on the competitive landscape of vacuum cleaners. And you're not sure how you got here. Or third, an opportunity presented itself from some situation or someone who believed in you and you thought, okay, I could do that. And then years go by and your career is a bit lackluster. You're good at your job, but it doesn't light you up. And the idea of making a career change feels overwhelming at this point. Yes, some people are lucky and stumble into their perfect careers. But if, if you don't love your career, it's usually because you didn't put in the months of hardcore soul searching, soul search before you job search. So that's exactly what I did. I thought I was going to work in journalism. Because I was a good writer, I had journalism experience and essentially every leading lady in the movies who had any amount of brains was always a journalist. It just seemed obvious until I actually started experiencing and doing research on the profession. I realized that the amount of pay I would get starting out would be low, which I was totally okay with. I was ready to grind in order to make better money. Put me in coach, I can do this. But when I kept doing more research I saw that the pay did not increase much mid career and it wasn't much more in late career either. Look, we have to be honest with ourselves about what we want and living a certain level of lifestyle mattered to me. I live in Los Angeles, an extremely expensive city and I was not willing to give up the hikes, the ocean breeze in my living room and the acai bowls on every block. I also knew I did not want a career where I was living deadline to deadline, emphasis on dead. I had journalism experience and with every story I turned in, I had to turn around and work on another highly time sensitive deadline. It was a grind that I knew I would never really fully escape and I wasn't willing to live my life that way. This is where I put in practice what later became the one page Career Vision. It sounds simple, but it's essentially a series of exercises, conversations, research and actions that allow you to uncover exactly what is the perfect next career step. There's a lot of hard work that goes into it, but by the end you have a clear one page of what you want in your career and you feel weightless when you look at it. You finally feel like you know what you want and how to get it. And all of that confidence shows through in your interviews and on your LinkedIn profile and you start to attract opportunities instead of having to constantly chase after them. I'm serious. My client Annie did her one page career vision and then discovered her perfect next career move was in corporate learning and development. And before she even transitioned into a new role and pivoted her new career, she was already getting inbound messages from from companies asking her to interview for their learning and development roles without her even applying to anything. I can link her video of her telling her story below if you're curious. Now, what I did at the beginning of my career is obviously not the one page career vision because I hadn't invented it yet. But through the years I was able to take what I did personally as a baseline and build the incredible system that thousands of people have been able to go through. If you want to get more information and preview. I recommend coming to the free 5 day upgrade your career masterclass or inquiring about coaching. I'll link both below. So what I did was I soul searched before I job searched. I got clear on what mattered to me by observing myself throughout my life. I knew the types of jobs that would energize me. I wanted something with teamwork, collaboration, the ability to climb the ladder and have achievements. I also looked at what I was good at. There are all different angles. You can take this, but for me, I have never been the smartest person in the room. I've always had to work very hard at getting good grades and being successful. But psychology and human behavior have always been nearly effortless for me. I've always been able to dissect human interactions and I know exactly how the interaction was effective or ineffective, what it means, and any psychology exam I took I would always completely ace it because everything felt so memorable and second nature to me. So once I saw that, I knew I needed to find a career that utilizes this as a superpower. Now, of course, what do people say when you say you like psychology? What job do you think they tell me I should do? Well, they say you should be a therapist. Okay, let's go back to the list I said before of the things that drove me collaboration. Yeah, you're not really collaborating much if you're dealing with individual clients climbing the ladder. Sure, there's ways you can move up, but that ladder has fewer and farther rungs. So I dug deeper. I looked into career paths from all different people who were good at psychology. This included speech language pathologists, human capital consultants, recruiters, human resources managers, UX designers, market researchers, advertisers, you name it. I did lots of informational interviews as well and I will link the script of questions I asked these people to get amazing information and I will link that down below through my conversations. I had to be realistic with myself. While each career path had something very interesting about it, I was able to detect when it would be a good or bad fit. And it turns out nearly all the jobs on that list I really did not want to do. But when I spoke with a mentor about her experience working in recruiting and people operations, I was in rapture. It was four finally work that felt completely compatible with me. And I will tell you, I dug deeper. I didn't just say I want to work in HR and recruiting. I got extremely specific about what industry. Working in HR in different industries can feel very different. And I am not someone who is great on the administrative side, I'm highly strategic, great at building programs and systems, but I'm not the person who will be hyper focused on payroll and benefits and employee documentation. I'm the kind of person person who will throw you the most epic eventful birthday party but also forget to buy the forks to eat the cake with. You know, details tend to escape me. I'm curious which way your personality leans. Put detailed or big picture in the comments. So I made sure to find industries where the HR function was seen as more strategic and less completely administrative. Which is why I settled on the technology industry. Do you see how everything I chose was not because I fell into it or because it was convenient. It was all part of of the grand plan to optimize my career for being the best possible situation for me. And I'm telling you, it worked big time. I landed my first dream job at an amazing tech company where it fully reinforced that I was in the right place. I landed it because that person who I had spoken to eight months prior about human resources, she and I had stayed in touch and finally when her human resources manager was underwater with too much work, they brought me in as a couple of arm flowies. There was never a job description, they never opened the role officially. They just needed someone quick. And I was in the right place at the right time, building the right relationships. Oh my gosh. Every day at that company was exciting. We had so many advanced people processes. I was helping to build training programs, I was in charge of the onboarding process for employees and the social life at the company was out of this world. We were always doing wild things like Nerf gun wars, mechanical bulls, hot dog eating competitions, you name it. And I know a lot of people say that those things aren't company culture and I agree with you. Those things don't replace having a great manager, having solid communication, having non toxic co workers. But holy moly was that full of fun and provided me with so many new experiences and, and I absolutely adored it. Now I was ultimately fired from that role, which I know sounds weird after I just talked about how it was the most amazing job ever. But the situation was pretty nuanced and in the end there weren't any hard feelings. But you should watch the video where I explain that situation in full because if you have ever been fired or even close to being fired, I know that you will relate to this. And there's a lot of things that if I was to go back in time, I wouldn't do again. I don't want you to fall into those traps either. So then I was on the job search and I have a full video of what it was like to job search after being fired. And again, I really do recommend watching that video because you can see how I analyze each opportunity and also the absolute despair I fell into after being terminated and how I was able to rise from the ashes and land the greatest job of my career. Truly harrowing. So to jump ahead in my next job search, I again got very clear about what I wanted next and I did my best to not sell myself short. I ended up landing the most incredible job I could have ever hoped for. I ended up leading the HR department at a growing tech company. My title was Manager of People operations and then within two years I was promoted to Director and I became the CEO's right hand for a lot of strategic decisions, especially when it came to organizational design, company culture and hiring. One of the reasons why I had gotten fired at my previous role was because I had a lot of very detail oriented work without having much context as to what I was working on. When I became the leader of the department and made all of the decisions and had all of the context, suddenly all of my mistakes disappeared. I was amazing at my job and nothing slipped by me. It was so effective, affirming and I finally had found something that completely fit my skill set at that job. I truly felt energized every day. Cue the dreamy montage. The work I was doing was so highly appreciated. I was recognized in the business and my co workers were incredibly interesting, intelligent and considerate. The company did hit some rough times though as so many growth stage companies that are doing something new and innovative do. And the good news was I was getting lots of inbound messages from recruiters at great companies asking me to interview with them to make sure my career was secure should I leave my job. Due to financial hardship in the business, I started doing lots of interviews. I ended up landing multiple job offers, but I ultimately took the one that offered the least amount of money. Again, my goal was not to please my family and friends with my career path and have the coolest sounding company on my resume or have the best biggest title and salary possible. I had offers that represented all of those things, but ultimately I chose a role that built out the company's corporate training programs from the ground up. And it was a B Corp Focused on renewable energy and this job was only a 15 minute bike ride from my house and had the most passionate and kind employees. And my manager was a legend in people leadership just from My interviews. I knew she was going to be someone who, who would help me to grow my career so much faster in that role. So after much consideration, I ended up accepting that role. And again, this role actually never appeared on any job boards. The recruiting firm found me on LinkedIn, introduced me to the company, and then the company created a role for me based on my skill sets. And once I was in the role, it was phenomenal. I was able to build out all of these training programs, design company retreats at beautiful locations with big budgets and I ran high performing team of employees who were incredibly talented. It was more of a specialist role than what I'd been doing before. And that's exactly what I wanted at that point in my career. It was a bit less pressure. I wasn't in charge of the entire people strategy, but it was also really fun, deep work that played directly into my strengths. Why did I leave that job? Well, I didn't want to go, but my business helping job seekers and was so darn successful that it no longer made sense for me to be focusing 40 hours a week on my full time job when that work was less profitable and less impactful than the scale of help I was giving job seekers. I am a very reluctant entrepreneur. I started this job search YouTube channel purely out of my love for helping others and sharing insights about everything I was seeing in my job in human resources. I never had plans for this to become a business and I certainly never thought it would be this successful. If you want to know the light and very dark sides of entrepreneurship, put make that video in the comments. I can be completely honest about what is good about having your own business and what no one tells you before you go into business for yourself. So put in the comments, make that video if you're interested in that. But now I'm able to focus all of my time on changing the lives of of job seekers. I guess you could say I'm now on my fourth dream job. And you can do this too. You can have a career full of jobs you wholeheartedly love. I don't think that your job should be your whole life, but I do think it should be one of your favorite parts. We spend so much time at work, it's gotta be right. If you want more videos like this, make sure you like this video and subscribe to this channel. You've got this wi fi high five.