How do you know that you are working for the right company? - How to build up your career

Introduction

One of the most difficult things in life is to find your proper partner. There are a lot of things what should match and the worst is that often you don’t really know what are these things exactly. If you find a candidate you have to decide after a while: “do I want to marry this person or not”. So you can only say yes or no and you have no idea about the other candidates. Maybe the next one will be better, maybe not.

To find your proper job at a proper company is almost as difficult as finding your partner. Here the only advantage is that you can change it easily whenever you want. But it is still the same: really often you don’t know what you are really looking for, you can always just say yes or no for an offer, but you have no idea what is coming in the future etc.

Collect your expectations

First of all before doing any change you have to collect what are your expectations. Of course your expectations can change from time to time based on your private life situation or by collecting some experience, so it is a good practice to update this list every year. Just as an example as a single you are glad to do a lot of business trips, but if you have small children most likely you will be looking for a job with as less business trips as possible.

I collected some ideas what can you consider on this expectation list:

• Tasks which you would be glad to overtake (doing pure development, being a manager, support sales, do testing etc.)
• Your salary expectations
• Your preferred working hours
• Amount of business trips
• Used technologies
• Overall topic of the project
• Level of responsibility
• Location
• Work environment

Regarding all these points consider what would you prefer and what can’t you accept at all.

If you have such a list that makes it much easier for you to find a proper position or making decisions.

Based on my experiences each and every company and position has its advantages and disadvantages. You will never find a job where all your expectations are properly fulfilled. But you can find one which is more or less covering the points which are the most important for you.

Be the best in an average team or average in an outstanding team

You should also decide what kind of team and what kind of challenges are you looking for?

The first option, which is proposed for the ones who are still in the first part of their career is to find a team/place where the others are technically very good, so that you can learn from them a lot.

The other option is to find a team or company where things are not going so good and you think you could help them. Join them and try to improve things there. I propose this option if you are well-experienced and you are looking for something challenging. While fighting to make a place better you can learn a lot. And you can also take over higher level positions very fast in this way. However I don’t suggest such an opportunity for people, who don’t have enough experience, because they can not really improve themselves in such an environment.

Plan the next steps

To be able to make a good career you have to always think about your next steps: what would you like to do, which new responsibility would like to overtake etc. Be always open, check regularly the open positions at other companies, but even the internal jobs at your current company. So that you should always know what are your choices as a next step. It is also good to know which direction you are pushing your career. But don’t stick too much to your plan.

Summary

It is difficult to find a good job, but it is not impossible at all, focus on your goals and you will find the right path.