Career Changes, Detours and Successful Failures: How to Handle the Unexpected in Working Life

Those of us who have made the effort to find useful things to do with our lives will know that things don't always work out the way we expect. We don't get offered a job, we make mistakes in the job we have, or unforeseen circumstances force us to do things differently. Most of us have faced either one of these, a combination, or all three. For me, it's the latter.

I've had the good fortune to try out different things in my career. I've tackled academia, volunteering and paid work, and each one had provided challenges, hardship and struggles to contend with. My ability to handle each of these has been varied, to say the least.

In 2014, I was on my Bachelor of Arts course in English. Each year, runnings were open for the University of Suffolk Students' Union , exactly like every university. Young and inexperienced as I was, I felt a need to find a positive role in which I could thrive and make a real, significant and good difference in the world around me, and prove my worth to myself and my colleagues. This is what led me to run for the role of Arts and Humanities Department Officer.

To call the experience a failure would be a major understatement. Suffice to say, I knew nothing about running a successful political campaign, I was hapless at devising policies and self-publicity, and I ended up with the lowest number of votes of all the candidates that year.

I had been told that everyone who runs for the Union learns good things from it, even if they don't win. This was the case for me, as my campaign turned out to be my worst mistake, not just at university but in my life so far. The main thing I learned was that I am completely unsuited to leading roles in politics, and that my destiny is to operate in supporting roles elsewhere. I have applied this knowledge to my subsequent career, and done better as a result.

Fortunately, undergraduate life was far from a write-off for me. I was able to serve the Union in the aforementioned smaller, supporting role as course rep for my cohort in the English department, developing the communication skills to fulfil the role as best I could. I went on to graduate with a 2:1, making my three years of study truly worthwhile. I was able to find some kind of success, despite my previous failure.

After university, I tried to develop a successful career in the "real world". As one might expect, the results for me have been as diversely mixed as they would be for any other human being trying to make their way through a confusing, dark, brutal world. My relative lack of work experience forced me into voluntary roles, building up a repertoire of skills and experiences to use as a showcase for my employability in paid jobs. Throughout the voluntary roles, and the paid ones when they eventually came, I went through dark days, rough patches, self-doubt and rejection, which I'm sure the vast majority of the human race will relate to in their own way.

My initial plans to teach secondary school English came to nothing when I attended interviews and placements in schools, realising that I had neither the fortitude nor the character to make the best of school life. My aspiration for full-time library work with Essex Library Services foundered when a lack of opportunities rendered this aspiration meaningless and impractical for a viable, long-term career path. Jobs with a restaurant and a payroll service ended after a matter of days, due to various problems and issues, some of which were my fault and some of which weren't. All of these experiences were confusing to go through, and not always pleasant.

Even my most significant and successful role so far with Open Road Visions has had its challenges to face. Trying to get my brain around certain processes as an administrator, like stationery orders and fire drills, proved to be prolonged challenges. I got there in the end, after weeks and months of toil, effort and mistakes which my anxious little head thought might get me fired.

It sounds like a cliche to say that these bad experiences made my life better, stronger and richer. I stand by this cliche, because it has a lot of truth. They've made me more aware of the world and myself, and they've enabled me to find ways to do things as well as possible, even if it takes more time and effort in certain cases. They've taught me to persevere in the face of hardship, and to be compassionate towards other people who struggle to do things.

My point is that hard experiences should not define you, but the way you handle them should. I myself used my own hard experiences to motivate me to balance them out with good experiences, and I hope this decision will be what defines me as a person.

I'm not the kind of person to wallow in misery when things don't go my way. I keep forging ahead in spite of it. I look for reasons to keep going and search for the good things in life to counteract the bad. If a naive simpleton like me can find the strength to do that, anyone can. If I can find success after the failures I've known, so can you.