While catching up with several high-school and university colleagues, I've discovered that we share the same concern at the moment: What to do with our lives?
After being done or almost done with our studies, it's high time for our next big decisions in life:
"where will I work? in which industry? what do I enjoy doing? where do I want to live? what's more important to me?"
become daily questions that make our minds twist and turn.
So, how do I approach it? I've started asking people I know, mostly colleagues from Romania, about what they want in life, how they perceive the Romanian business environment and career opportunities there, and if they have ever considered to work outside Romania.
The answers were congruent no matter what they studied. The conclusions of my small scale survey are:
- Romania is a place of lots of business opportunities. As an entrepreneur you can make money whatever your business is specialized in. As an employee, the more challenging career opportunities in terms of tasks and learning perspectives are to be found in multinational companies.
- The ones surveyed all shared the wish of working sometimes in the future outside Romania, even if not on a permanent basis.
- Neither of them knows for sure what they want to do for a job and they see their first job as "scanning the industries to look for what I like". As long as you're enjoying the activity that you're doing, it's enough for now. You needn't have to stay in your first job forever.
When I asked them on what criteria they choose the location to live in, some patterns were evident:
- choosing to be where the most interesting accessible career opportunities were
- choosing to stay in the same city as where they have studied because they have most of their friends there
- choosing to be close to the family
When being asked why they plan to go and work outside Romania, opinions were also congruent:
- outside I can have a better quality of life - free time opportunities, housing, transportation system
- the mentality of people is different - waiting for someone to help you vs. making your way
- i want to work in a diverse and international environment - enjoy diversity of people, food, traditions
- i want to be able to use foreign languages at my work
Although this didn't really help me in making my decisions, it was a nice feeling to see that I'm not the only one who is going through this tough time now. We should have faith that things will turn out to our best and try to find the answers to ONE question only at a time.
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