I would consider myself as an ambitious person that is willing to take some risks to take a look on the other side. Having studied and worked in the Netherlands for 10 years I decided to move to Berlin together with my partner. 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 and also now in Germany, I get interesting chances to step into the kitchen of clients and work on larger and international teams of big companies.

However, consultancy also means that projects can be short term and at some companies it also means your external status limits your access and freedom to experiment. Therefore I always try to maintain an open attitude to learn about other companies and interesting projects.

Through this attitude, some time ago I encountered an Engineering role where I would work more directly on a project. Here I was able to go through all three interview rounds, but ended up not getting an offer.

This reminded me of someone mentioning to me that “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 noticed during the rounds 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.

Additionally, I am trying to learn more about how to steer your career to do more good, for this I have bought two books: