What's next after my career break

• I took a leap of faith to experiment with two new career paths.
• It didn’t quite work out but I’ve learnt a lot about myself and I’m ready for my next adventure!
• Here, I share a story about my journey, along with a framework that helped me find my feet in the career transition and what’s next for me.

Towards the latter end of 2019, I left Westpac with the support of my manager to embark on a year long career break. I was not sure how it would all pan out (in retrospect, 'not sure' was definitely an understatement), but I had set 3 key intentions.

?? Intentions

1. Explore alternative career paths beyond technology project management.
2. Spend more time with my ageing parents and attend to their immediate health issues.
3. Embark on a 6 month backpacking trip through all 7 continents or maybe find work overseas.

While I had parked the global trotting dream indefinitely for the time being due to the pandemic, I pushed onwards with my first two intentions.

In this blog post, I’ll share my story experimenting with two new career paths, and how I’ll shape my next adventure. More on my second intention later on.

?? Alternative Career Paths

I was grateful to have kicked off my career with an 18 month internship working across Deloitte, CBA, and Origin Energy (thanks UNSW Co-op) before landing my graduate position at Westpac.

At Westpac, I had a phenomenal learning experience. From doing a 3 month stint in our Singapore and Hong Kong office, to managing an open innovation project sourcing and implementing 500+ continuous improvement ideas and working in 3 different divisional CIO offices - I was always on the edge of my seat engaged and challenged. About 2 years in, I started to develop an interest in emerging technologies and our senior leaders got word so they staffed me on a project helping roll out an AI chatbot to 4 million mobile banking customers. I learnt heaps, met lots of awesome people, and thoroughly enjoyed my time, but felt like I was not bringing my whole-self to work. By day, I was a project manager, and by night, I was a consultant, speaker, social entrepreneur and educator.

Photo by Efe Ya??z Soysal on Unsplash

I had been teaching digital transformation and social entrepreneurship on and off outside of work at UNSW as a casual academic. Each time a student would light up with an epiphany, I got a jolt of energy and satisfaction. What if I could do this as a full time gig? I was curious to test my hypothesis - David Ky enjoys teaching as a full time career.

I spoke to a few mentors to collect information. They said that those who thrive in higher education usually have credentials, and command mastery over academic research (this is slowly changing across most universities including UNSW). I was not completely sold on investing 4 years of my life to get a PhD at this point in time. My preference would be to maximise the upside risk, and minimise the downside risk in the cheapest way possible. I shared my dilemma with one of my past lecturers and I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time. After a few weeks, she reached out to see if I was interested to in an opportunity. A series of gigs stitched together to design and run a course in Myanmar on design thinking, conduct case study research on social enterprises, write academic papers on innovation, and attend an international research conference at Arizona State University all the while paid enough to cover my living expenses. It was too good of an opportunity to miss, and so with the support of my manager at Westpac, I took a year long career break to take what life gave me with both my hands to give it a go and see what I could learn about myself. And learn a lot, I did.

Our UNSW COMM3030 students after learning how to adapt a design thinking toolkit from qualitative research, to customer journeys and empathy maps into the context of international development.

Working with ActionAid Myanmar to uplift entrepreneurial capability among the community.

Workshop participants getting together to articulate their business plans before pitching to ActionAid for seed funding.

With Astronaut Colonel Caddy Coleman and PLuS Alliance Director Vinitia Chanan at a research conference brainstorming how we could make space education more accessible.

Introducing Griffith and Wescheler’s Impact Project Map at the PLus Alliance Symposium 2019.

While I absolutely loved the impact I could make as an educator, I didn't see myself becoming an academic anytime soon. Reflecting back on my own education experiences, I learnt the most from lecturers that mixed together the theory with practical and pragmatic insights from their lived experiences - a Pracademic. I also care about scale of impact, and formal primary through to tertiary education at the moment is not very scalable (compared to for example media and entertainment). Another thing that made it difficult to pursue this path further are the program and staff cuts across the board as a result of the pandemic. Taking this all into consideration, I decided to park my pursuits in the tertiary education system for the time being and keep my mind open to other possibilities.

Led by my curiosity, I began experimenting with the non-profit sector. I started off providing consulting and advisory services to charities and very quickly learned that one of the biggest challenges of the industry was finding funding. So I rolled up my sleeves, helped apply for grants, and evolved the maturity of these non-profits to become more competitive applying for grants. I also came up with alternative funding pathways e.g. through developing products or services leveraging their strengths and opportunities to earn revenue towards sustaining their impact. Through my work, I was elected and appointed my first board position at the Dawn Foundation where we harness digital media for advancing diversity and inclusion. I was drawn to the Dawn Foundation’s work because I’m not happy about the negative stereotypes we perpectuate about minorities (which start to shape reality) and I believe that media can shift this culture. Shortly after, I joined the Enactus Australia board to advance youth leadership and social entrepreneurship. Here, I represent the voice of young people who Enactus seeks to equip with skills and confidence to create the world they want to live. Because I can align my strengths with a strong sense of purpose, I can work into the wee hours of the day without feeling tired. However…it is difficult to financially sustain myself ?? unless I work for a larger charity or do probono work through a corporate/consulting firm. I could not continue on this same path as I will eventually burn out - ramen only gets you so far before hair will fall out.

Photo by Oliver Roos on Unsplash

I'm not sure where next but what I do know is that while I deeply care about helping others, I need to balance it with my love of learning, desire for human connection, and a way to financially sustain myself. Sector (private vs public), stage (startup vs scaleup vs corporate) and industry (education vs finance vs healthcare vs food vs ecommerce) for me are just a means to an end - finding interesting and meaningful problems to solve with people I enjoy spending time with. I also learned a whole great deal about my strengths, weaknesses and you can read more about those reflections here.

Getting this level of clarity over what matters most to me was not easy. But it will greatly help me find and evaluate my next career adventure. To help, I meshed together a bunch of different frameworks from ‘Designing Your Life’ by Bill Burnet and Dave Evans, 80000hours.org, and Julian Sharpio’s article on ‘What you should be working on’ to carve a path forward.

In short, I worked through 3 exercises:

1?? Writing - about the past to shape the future

• I did a pulse check on how I felt about different aspects of my life from work, play, love, and health. Did it feel balanced or out of balanced? What areas could I improve and what stands in the way?
• Articulated my vision for work vs life, and working through any clashes to align them together.
• Articulate my key values which I will use to assess career opportunities (how to and example).
• Jotting down moments over the a month where I felt a strong or weak sense of engagement, flow, or high energy. Bill and Dave call this a ‘Good Time Journal’ (template).
• Using the Good Time Journal, I drew out themes or trends which can give insight to what actitives, environments, interactions, objects or people I want more vs less of.

2?? Drawing - out vision(s) for the future

• Created a mind map visually organise my reflective writing outputs.
• Picking up disparate items from the mindmaps, I mash them together to see if I could come up with ideas for new jobs that I would enjoy or resonate with. The key here is to withhold judgement so that I could generate as many options as possible .
• I prioritise some of these ideas and create ‘Odessey Plans’ (examples with how to article here).

3?? Asking - questions to prototype and validate career path hypothesis

• I reach out to people both within and outside of my network for informational interviews over coffee/zoom as a way to (a) gather information that is current and not available online; (b) find career paths I didn’t know existed; (c) access insider knowledge on how to prepare and land first position; (d) get a feel for company and team culture; and (e) build professional relationships and expand network (tips on how to do this from Bekerley and HBR).
• From these informational interviews, I asked to see if there are opportunities to shadow or work on a pro-bono project.
• Sometimes after the shadowing or pro-bono project, I ask to see if it could lead to an internship or an offer for a position.
• When I’m talking to people, I also considered breaking down the bigger roles into something smaller e.g. I envisioned in one version of my Odessey Plan that I’d run a social impact focused venture studio, startup factor or accelerator. Perhaps a scaled down version of this is to join a rocketship startup in BizOps/CoS or innovation management team in a corporate or double down on social impact consulting.

From the 3 exercises, I formed a wish list*:

Chief of Staff or Strategy & Operations Manager or Product Manager @ Startup/Scaleup

Business Designer or Consultant @ IDEO-like consulting firm

Innovation Manager or Strategic Initiatives Project Manager @ Corporate

*I don’t care about the titles or seniority. I care more about how I can contribute, opportunities to learn, and the people I’ll be spending time with.

Perhaps you know someone across startups, scaleups, corporate or consulting looking for help from a strategy and operations generalist who is hungry to learn and contribute towards impact. In the meantime, I'm also open to chatting about short term projects, part-time gigs introductions with anyone who'd like to share their experiences coming out of a career break or navigating a career transition.

I'm excited for the year ahead. Instead of setting new year resolutions, intention setting has served me well so here I go with setting my 3 new intentions:

1. ? Continue Adventure - find and land opportunities to align my strengths with a strong sense of purpose.
2. ?? Cultivate Mind - develop and embed habits to create abundant capacity and capability through sleep, nutrition, fitness and reading.
3. ?? Fostering Community - balance meeting new people with building upon my existing relationships with friends, family and broader communities.

With these intentions, I can ebb and flow to navigate the uncertainty ahead!

Bring on 2021!

David

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Point One is a writing project to help me become a better thinker, facilitate meaningful conversations, spark human connection and share my learnings overtime (origin story).

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?? Header photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash