Having studied and worked in Amsterdam for 10 years I decided together with my German partner to move to Berlin. While Amsterdam offers a very high standard of life, we were ready to mix things up a bit. Having visited both London and Berlin before, we felt Berlin offered a more welcoming mixture of big city vibes and available opportunities. I decided that I wanted to take this move as an opportunity to get a better understanding of the direction I would like my career to go in.

Having worked in consultancy before I quickly found a similar opportunity in Berlin. As a consultant, you get interesting chances to step into the kitchen of clients and work on larger and international teams of big companies. I believe that these interactions, combined with lots of knowledge shares, enables a faster learning curve then working for a single company in a similar timeframe.

However, consultancy also means that projects can be short term or less interesting than the main topics a client is working on. I have also experienced that it being an external employee, limits your access and freedom to experiment. In any case, I think it is always wise to try to maintain an open attitude to learn about other companies and interesting projects.

Therefore, when looking for a job in Berlin I was not only looking for jobs in consultancy. For one of the Engineering roles I applied to, I was able to finish all three interview rounds, but ended up not getting an offer. While this not the result I was hoping for of course, I noticed I also felt quite relieved in a sense.

This reminded me of the saying “Rejection is redirection”.

I think you can take this in two ways. At first you could say this an easy way out when you have not succeeded, perhaps it can even work demotivating and makes you give up more easily. But I think you should read it more as a “follow your gut” instinct. I took the interviews very serious, but when reflecting on the whole process, I actually already felt that what the company is focussing on was maybe not aligned with my personal vision.

Here, I am learning that looking for a job should be a match on two sides to make it a good fit. This is a luxury position, since not everyone is able to be picky when it comes to work. But I do think it is something that is worth giving some time to think about.

The coming time I will focus on learning more about how to steer your career to do more good, for this I have bought two books: