My Career Mistakes For You To Avoid

As any human do, I made mistakes, some of which are related to my career, many of which I still have pang of regret for to this day. Sometimes I even indulge myself in the game of What-If because of them. What if I had done this? What would have happened if I had done that? I know they say that What-If is the most of pathetic game of all, but what your brain knows and how your body should react are not always consistent.

So then, when you have niggling thoughts of past mistakes in your mind, what else there is to do? It was then I figured that rather ruminating on my mistakes myself, it would be more beneficial for me to monetize share them. I can’t change the past, but perhaps what I could do is prevent others from making the same mistakes.

There is a long list of things which I constitute as my mistakes, but for the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on few of my career mistakes or mistakes that I’ve made in the course of my professional development.

Perhaps the first mistake that I made is the fact that I didn’t try to find internship opportunities that aligns with my interest, i.e. writing. Back then, searching for jobs and opportunities was unknown and thus, scary to me even though it has become natural for me to do now that I’m used to it. Instead, I ended up taking internship for my college credit in a place that I’m already familiar with and not something that aligns more with my interest.

The second mistake that I’ve made is not to look for jobs immediately after I completed my thesis. This has to do with the fact that I underestimated how hard job search can be. While I could set aside some time to relax after finishing my thesis, I should’ve begun my job search before I graduated. The fact that I was scared of searching for jobs also plays into this as well.

The third mistake that I made was not using Instagram early when I was looking for more job opportunities, especially internships. While there are plenty of job opportunities posted on platforms like LinkedIn and Jobstreet, I found that there are plenty of announcement posted on Instagram that don’t exist in those platforms, especially openings for internships.

And so, these are the things that I wish I could've prevented from doing. It may be too late for me, but I hope it's not for you!