Evaluating job opportunities — sometimes it’s not about the money

Every once in a while, I stop and evaluate myself among my peers. I know you’re not supposed to compare yourself to others but I can’t help it — I like judging myself sometimes through external benchmarks and one way that I do it is by thinking about who my peers are and how far I’ve progressed compared to them. I would be lying if I said that it didn’t make me happy to know that I’m ahead of them in some ways and sad that I’m behind in other ways.

I then start to think about all of the decisions that I had to make at branching paths to get to this point. A great way of improving how you make decisions is by evaluating past decisions and while you can never get a full sense of how a different decision would pan out, you can at the very least, think about the decision that you made and the factors that you did not realize when making a decision. As an example, when I made the switch into consulting, I did not realize that by putting myself into that world, it would open me up to a lot of networking opportunities. I think it would be safe to say that my previous job at the government did not have as many networking opportunities — part of the reason is because of the type of work that we do (we don’t have clients in the sense of consulting and we aren’t working with new clients, or at least I wasn’t, every couple of months).