On Choosing Jobs

Dear Piepie,

I’m going to be changing jobs soon. I first changed jobs a few months after you were born and now, as you’re nearing two, I’ll be changing jobs again. A decade ago, this pace of changing jobs will probably be considered quick, but nowadays, a two-year tenure is no longer considered that short. I do hope that I’ll be with my next role longer though.

There are many reasons that I’m moving, but in all such decisions, there’s always a pull and push. An attraction towards the new situation and some disenchantment towards the current situation. In this letter however, I thought it might be helpful to reflect on the pull – how I thought about whether the new situation is something that is attractive to me. In 20 years’ time, perhaps the notion of work has changed so much that what I’m writing here no longer fully applies. We’ll have that discussion again if that’s the case.

There are many factors goes into whether a role is attractive – below are some of the typical considerations:

• Current compensation
  • Pay and package: How much is the monthly pay and what are the leave and medical benefits?
  • Stability of pay and package: How much of your package is guaranteed (not in annual bonus or commissions)? How financially stable is the company that is employing you? What is the company’s policies on redundancies, and do they retrench employees often?
• Alignment to future goal
  • Skillset building: Does what you will be doing help develop skillsets that will allow you to pursue your future goals?
  • Exposure to industry: Does the work expose you to people who might be able to help you with your future goal?
  • Internal mobility/trajectory: Does the company offer good internal mobility and trajectory?
• Content of work
  • How much do you think you will enjoy the day-to-day job scope?
    • There will always be grunt work that needs to be done, but everyone has hidden superpowers – things that are ‘boring’ to most which they simply enjoy doing more than others. For me, I quite enjoy working on excel spreadsheets and reading about businesses and annual reports, which is why I am going into investments
• Culture
  • Work-life balance: How many hours do you have to work a week? How are those hours spread out (across evenings and/or weekends)?
  • Working relationship with superiors: Is your superior ‘fair’ and ‘supportive’? Will you be able to work well with him/her?
  • Working environment with colleagues: What kind of colleague relationships does the work environment foster? What’s the demographic mix of employees?
    • I’m assuming here that most people are nice, and that the company structure dictates a lot of the interpersonal interactions
    • There are no absolute ‘good’ or ‘bad’ environment, just one that fits what you’re optimising for at that moment

While there are many factors here (and the list is far from comprehensive), what factors you should weight more heavily depends on your personality, interest, and the stage of life you’re at. As a young college graduate with minimal financial commitments, you might not need to weight current compensation and content of work as highly, but to value opportunities that builds up your skillset and connections in the direction of what you might want to do in the future. If you don’t know what you want to do, as is common with many young people, opportunities that allow you to ‘try things’ (eg. rotate across functions and departments), or which keeps career paths open (eg. consulting), might be attractive. In my current career transition, I can definitively say that I am optimising for culture and content of work, while making willing sacrifices to career progression and compensation. Put differently, I am choosing to do something that I think I will enjoy, in an environment with people I like working with, even if it means I have to take a slight pay cut and lose out on potentially faster career progression elsewhere.

Also, you only get the chance to evaluate roles if you’re willing to wait for the right opportunity, while being clear about what that right opportunity is. The more desperate you are to leave your current situation, the less attractive the opportunity needs to be for you to move. And it becomes more likely for you to make a move that you come to question later. Opportunities do not come along when you want them to. Often, they appear when you least expect them. But knowing what you want allows you to pounce at a moment’s notice, so be prepared.

Lastly, being able to choose your career is a privilege. Remember that most people who lived before, even just centuries ago, never had this choice. Cherish this ‘power’!

Love, Dad