Going back to work after you have kids
I know when my son entered kindergarten, it caused me quite a bit of anxiety. Not so much for him, but for myself: now I needed to really do something about work. I had been skating along working freelance occasionally, but it felt like all my small child excuses had evaporated.
I’ve heard from many moms trying to figure out what to do next with their careers. It’s tough when you’re no longer in school, or even school-age, and most of your friends are already deep in their own careers.
Who doesn’t love a good quiz?
Don’t roll your eyes, quizzes are actually quite useful in discovering what you’re interested in without getting hung up on industries or job titles. There are a few quizzes on the WorkBC site that will get you thinking.
Abilities
There’s the Abilities quiz, where you rate how easy you find certain types of tasks, like solving problems, recognizing new words, proofing text, figuring out abstract mathematical concepts, and so on. When I did the quiz, some career paths came up that I never would have considered: general practitioner, diagnosing physician, veterinarian, and forestry professional. I like that you can see straight away what kind of schooling each suggested career path would require.
Work preferences
This quiz gets to the bottom of how you like to work – with people, with machines, fixing things, solving problems, leading a team, being told what to do, or being left to figure things out on your own. Just thinking about the questions is a bit enlightening. The answers to this quiz were more what I expected (Editor!), but there were a few suggestions that surprised me. Dietitian and nutritionists, and architecture and science managers. I like helping people to solve problems, and I’m curious about how things work, so I could see how those would come up, but I never considered them as a career path.
If you’re rethinking what you’d like to do for work, take a look and let it your answers give you some ideas on what to do next.
This post is sponsored by the Government of BC. Map your career plan with Blueprint Builder. Visit this easy-to-use tool to explore career paths, find the right education and funding, and search for jobs in your field. Visit workbc.ca to find out more.
