When I left Toronto, I imagined travelling a bit and then stepping into the same life but in a different city. I was going to continue my career pursuit of analysis. What can I say? I am one of those people who like excel. I wanted to learn more, so I started taking courses online while I was still on holiday in my first month in Australia. I wanted the career I envisioned but on an international scale. Alas, it was not to be. The very first recruiter that I encountered said because of the visa restriction of 6 months with each employer, I would not be able to get that type of position. I was disheartened, I took a temp job that I hated from week one and a month later decided to do farm work.

The first 3 weeks of work were a struggle but I got through those 3 months. Yet, you won’t see that on my resume/CV, even though it was one of the most character-building experiences I could have gotten. I went from doing an office Job to getting up at the crack of dawn to pick and package Sweet Potatoes. For 3 months I endured back aches, slept on plastic mattresses, developed a carpal tunnel and woke up with a tingling arm daily. Somehow, I do not feel that I can put that on my CV as ‘relevant experience. Yet, from that experience I proved to myself I can do anything that I set my mind to. Before then and until now, that has been the case. When I go after what I want it sometimes feels like things fall into my lap. But after work has just felt like fluffy job titles and easy work.

Sales Support Administrator, SAP Data Administrator, and Business Support Officer are all entry-level jobs that required no real thought - copy-paste reply to an email, repeat.

All except the one job I thoroughly enjoyed, Event Assistant. I won’t go into details, but all I will say is there was a variety of tasks and it was BUSY. Like eat lunch at your desk and still do over time, busy. It was good busy the type of job where you were sometimes overwhelmed but never bored, where you saw the results at the end and it made you smile because all the “busy” was worth it.

I almost got my career job as an Analyst 7 days after landing in the UK, only for it to be put on pause due to the pandemic. For the first 2 months, I tried to be hopeful like everyone else. I finished 2 intros to python courses. I loved them and hated them at the same time. The brilliance and power from a few lines of code intrigued me, but the debugging tried my patience, a virtue that I know that I sometimes lack. But data is everything!

I survived the boredom and repetitiveness of my 7-month contract as an Investment Reporting Administrator. I was depressed working from home, I got into hospitality to recoup the tedium that was working from home and finish up the short term I had left on my UK visa. I hated it.

Arrived in France only to get a job as a Bartender. I also hated it but was about to endure another bout of the carpal tunnel for 6 months because the top 2022 goal was to learn French. International experience and a second language. But I didn’t want to be a Bartender(tbh I applied to reception) so now here I sit, in the centre of Brussels pondering life, my career, what it was and what I want it to be.

Can I find a way back to Big Data, spreadsheets, CRM databases, reporting and dashboards?

Can we go back to the 9-5 dream, the easy life, the routine? But is that the dream? Or something we were taught by the tv screen?