It will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the journey of those on the fellowship programme that our minds are now turning to "what happens next". There is a world of opporunity out there and having had many conversations already (yes, I'm practising all I learnt about networking while in the USA) I can see lots of possibilities. The question I'm sill finding it hard to answer is about what I actually want to do. My background is in commercialising technology and I really enjoy that environment, but since starting this programme I have found an increasingly broad range of businesses interesting...
The company I am doing my current Externship with, ATEEDA, is in the semiconductor business so I have taken to reading a few of the industry blogs to try to immerse myself in the industry as much as I can. Once of those blogs is EDA Grafitti which has previously covered ATEEDA, and is written by a chap I met a couple of times while I was out in California through University of Edinburgh events. A recent post was a guest blog entry from someone who has just moved to a new role, and he refers to this Fortune article by Christopher Lochhead (sounds like a Scottish name to me!) about finding a new job in the tech sector. It proposes 10 things to look for in a geat job the first few of which are:
...
If you want to see the rest (I don't want to be guilty of copyright theft here!) then I suggest you go and read the Fortune article, which I think really applies to many sectors and not just to tech... Many of the messages are things that I've heard already this year, but I think it draws the list together very nicely. You can find career advice in the most unexpected of places...
In fact, I think I'll keep a copy of the list handy for evaluating opportunities I stumble across....
What a great comment, and a fantastic article too.
One piece of advice I recently received when evaluating opportunities was to undertake the following.
a) write doen what you want to achieve - with no constraint on time, money or indeed obligations.
b) next that that write down what you are truly passionate about i.e. what you love to do both in and out of your professional life.
c) then look for the connections between the two.
You'll be amazed what this throws out and interestingly, how the opportunities you might be pursuing fit with what you want to do and what you absolutely love....
Certainly it has helped me, as we head down the final stages of this year-long adventure.
Good luck with whatever comes your way.