Time To Re-Evaluate Your Career

What happens when you reach a turning point in your career? What if you have been in a field for ten years and feel the urge to change?

Tom reached that stage at the age of 25. He started as a child actor, received a degree in drama, and worked in the theater as an adult. Then he realized he needed a change. Tom wanted to use his creativity, but he also wanted to move into a field that had more practical promise.

“I had run out of options. I wasn’t doing anything wrong; I just felt it was time to re-evaluate. I needed to find out what was true about me. I almost hoped someone would tell me that I should be an accountant.”

Tom took The Highlands Ability Battery and he wasn’t advised to be an accountant. Instead, he found out that he was in the right arena, but that he wasn’t using all of his abilities to the best advantage. He discovered that he had the ability to solve problems in a well thought-out, logical manner and that he had a sense of how relationships work in the real world. These abilities, along with musical abilities, an eye for detail and a high vocabulary, all pointed to the role of a person who wants to write and direct productions rather than act in them.

Tom was delighted. “This quantified things that I had always intuited, and reinforced the general direction in which I had already been moving. I learned that I had been in the right ballpark but I needed to move toward something more sensitive to my abilities. All of my experience had been in theater; I didn’t know much about film. But I saw that by using my talents as a director or writer in film, I could apply what I really knew to a field that had more commercial promise.”

Determined to put this knowledge to use, Tom applied to several film schools, was accepted by the University of Southern California, and has received a Master of Fine Arts degree in film production. He has started using the surveying techniques he learned from the Highlands book Don’t Waste Your Talent to implement his plan for the future. Tom has found an agent and written a screenplay which is being considered by a major film company.

What helped Tom the most was the realization that he could listen to his own feelings and ideas as well as the ideas of his Highlands Certified Consultant. He came up with several options and then used surveying techniques to determine which options offered the most promise. He found out that he “shouldn’t close the door on change when new options arise.”