Discover Your Dream Job: How to Find and Evolve Your Ideal Career

Let’s redefine the dream job. It’s not the one perfect job you stick with forever.

Your dream job is the best job you can imagine for yourself RIGHT NOW.

It’s impossible to know your dream career for your entire life from the start. For several reasons:

• Your career experiences different phases. You might focus on moves that bring in the most money or where you’re going to learn the most.

• As you gain more skills and experience and get exposed to new ideas, what you can imagine for your dream job changes. Meeting my friend Sophie changed what amount of money I felt I could expect at that point in my career.

• Your priorities change. The classic is the impact of having children. But it also could be travel or spending more time with your parents or simply wanting more time outside of work.

When I arrived back in New Zealand, the job I landed was the BEST role I could have dreamed of at that point. I loved my manager, I loved my team, I loved what I was doing everyday.

After two years in that role, as I learnt new skills, gained new experience and grew as a person, my vision for my dream job expanded.

What I knew was possible, and what I could imagine, had shifted with that growth.

I had new things I wanted to learn. I had a new combination of skills I wanted to be using everyday. I had a new appreciation of how I worked most effectively and what environment I needed to be in to support that.

I got a new job that reflected all of those things.

Now a new job is not the only way you can step into the next level of your dream role. Promotions, secondments, special projects, changing teams, starting a side hustle, study or upskilling, going part time are all ways for your work to evolve.

Which brings us to our first benefit of knowing your dream job.

Stop Blindly Chasing More

When we don’t know what we want, we just keep going up because we don’t know what else to aim for.

That void of not knowing our vision gets filled by the societal default which is that we should want MORE.

The pay rises. The promotions. More responsibility. Bigger teams. Management roles.

What does more actually mean for you?

• More time with your family.

• More creativity.

• More flexibility in your schedule.

• More calm (which is to say less stress).

• More time to read (which is to say you can want simple things).

• More support at work.

• More problem solving rather than reliving the same issues over and over.

• More stability and clarity of what’s needed to succeed.

• More focus time.

• More collaboration with your colleagues.

Discovering your dream job means you know what opportunities to pursue and which one’s don’t align. You can stop pursuing more for the sake of it and pursue what you know will make you happy, fulfilled, satisfied.

Set Intentional Professional Goals

When you know what to pursue, you can align your professional development to your dream job.

How often do you sit down with your manager to set professional goals for the year or whatever professional development looks like at your company and have no idea what you want to focus on?

When you have no idea what you’re aiming for, it’s really hard to:

• figure out what steps will help you get there,

• identify what courses or trainings are going to be valuable,

• ask for what you want and make a game plan with your manager on how to get there.

Those goal setting conversations become so arbitrary, coming up with SOMETHING to tick the box.

Discovering your dream job gives you direction to your professional development.

READ MORE: How do you achieve your goals. Steal my process.

Know When It’s Time To Quit

When you know what your dream job looks like, you can easily see when your current role doesn’t line up anymore.

Quitting has so many negative connotations. It’s seen as failure and something to be avoided at all costs.

Quitting your job also means jumping into a job search, a process most people dislike and try to avoid.

We don’t want to quit. Which means we’re emotional about quitting, making it harder to evaluate the situation clearly. I know I’ve stayed at jobs a lot longer than I should have because of fear of failure and wanting to avoid a job search.

When you have your dream job defined, you’ve created criteria you can use to evaluate your current job, any job you apply for, any future job.

It gives you a framework for making the decision to quit.

The Universe Aligns With You

This one might feel more left field but stick with me because I’ve seen this happen so many times.

I worked with a client on reigniting passion in her career. Weeks into our time together she was approached for a secondment that allowed her to stay in the industry she loved while developing a whole new skillset. EXACTLY the kind of opportunity she wanted and it came to her!

I’ve seen this happen time and time again when clients get clear on their dream job.

It even happened to me.

When I was outgrowing the dream role mentioned earlier, I was aiming for a promotion thinking that would reinvigorate me. Instead a friend got in touch about an opportunity at his work, I went for coffee with the boss and got offered the job on the spot. That role gave me everything I was searching for in pursuing the promotion.

Call it manifestation or call it serendipity, when you get clear on what you want, the universe rearranges around your vision.

Your Dream Job Is a Guide, Not a Destination

When you take the time to discover your dream job, everything else becomes easier:

• You pursue aligned growth

• You make career decisions with confidence

• You trust your own desires

This clarity creates momentum. And momentum creates opportunity.

Your dream job will change over time. That’s not a problem — it’s the point.

Keep evolving. Keep redefining success on your own terms.

If you were in your dream job, what is one thing that would be different to your current role?