Photo credit: Flickr/ kewl

A friend of mine and I went out to one of my favourite pubs a few nights ago to talk about his career. He’s considering making a move from his current employer to be able to pursue other interests, but wasn’t sure if he should.

You see, his current job is with a very well-respected company and his position looks incredible on paper. The problem is that he’s just not challenged.

In short, he doesn’t love what he’s doing, and I think this is a problem for him.

Why you need to love what you do

So why should this be such a big deal? Work is work, after all. Do you really need to love what you do?

Yes. You do.

Now, as much as I’d like to wrap this post up with that being said, I’ll try and rationalize this a bit more for you ;-)

There are 5 important reasons to love your job:

1. At least a half of your waking hours spent at work. If you’re upset about being at work because you don’t love what you do, you’re on average a sad person. That’s no way to live.
2. It will be very difficult for you to invest in your career. If you’re not into what you do, what would possess you to seek out extra training, certifications, conferences and the like? It’s hard to imagine spending extra time outside of work investing in something you don’t like.
3. You’ll never be truly great at what you do. If you don’t have any passion for your work, and you’re not spending time and energy upgrading your skills, how will you ever improve in your field?
4. You won’t get promotions. This ties into points 2 and 3. It’s tough to imagine promoting someone who isn’t great at what they do, and doesn’t really show an interest in what they do.
5. You’ll lack fulfillment. If you spend your time doing something other that what you love to do, you’ll always have that feeling like you’re missing out on something. You’ll spend your days watching the clock, waiting until you can leave the office to do what you really want to be doing. Bad times.

What to do if you don’t love your work

The first thing to do is to resolve to DO something about it. Take action. Doing something is better than wishing things would just change.

You can earn a living with just about any skill. Luckily for engineers, there are opportunities abound. There’s a huge spectrum of industries and companies that put engineers to work in hundreds of different roles. Not only that, the analytical and mathematical skills that engineers have can be put to work in business, finance, computer science, or any number of other fields.

An education in engineering affords people huge opportunities, even outside of engineering. Be creative. Look up professions you think might be interesting on http://www.onetonline.org/find/. Look people up with those professions on LinkedIn and ask them questions.

Whatever you do, you need to dig until you’re happy. You owe it to yourself to put the effort in.

Moving Forward

I’ll leave you with two tasks.

First, decide for yourself if you’re passionate about what you do. If you’re not, move to step 2.

Second, take action. No matter how small, you need to commit to doing something to change your situation.

Third, tell me what your actions are in the comments section below. Share with other readers what you’re doing, what’s working and what’s not.