Sometimes, as a professor of communication and media sciences, I am uneasy talking about career options becasue who knows where you might end up with a communication degree.

Sure many, maybe even the majority of grads ,will travel along the traditional prescribed career path but more and more today students are going madly off in different and new directions.

What I have learned over the last 6 years of doing radio interviews on DubaiEye is that more often than not our career paths are anything but obvious.

Take Daniella Williams as a case in point.

Today Daniella is a very good and very successful accountant to small business.

Daniella has been called the thinking accountant and this has happened because she is far more than a book minder.

But Daniella did not get to this point following the typical carrer trajectory.

Daniella studied piano, violin and drama initially and went on to become a music teacher.

Then after 3 or so years of teaching Daniella realized that teaching was not her love and instead of sticking it out, becasue teaching is a vocation you know, she went back to school and got an accounting degree.

Today Daniella has married education and accounting as she works  with SMEs to help them learn to be successful.

Who would have thought?

And it is because of stories like this that I often find it hard to point a student down a specific career path.

I was totally inspired by Daniella and recommend listening to this interview with anyone who really wants to take their career in a different direction but is not sure if they should.

Totally 100% inspiring.

Not a literal box, but we do stereotype people according to what we think they do in their particular profession.

Take the accountant.

Want to be stuck in an elevator with an accountant?

Probably not.

But accountants are people just like the rest of us, yet they get such a bad rap.

Well meet Daniella Williams.

Daniella is billed at the thinking accountant and she works with SME’s to help them get their heads around the money side of the business.

What I found interesting was that Daniella came to accounting via piano, drama, violin and a stint working in her Dad’s garage.

If there has ever been a reason to get a liberal arts education Daniella is the poster child.

Have a listen to our conversation, Daniella is not your typical accountant.

The message from this conversation is simple, do what you love and do it better than anyone else.

Yes ANYTHING you love to do will take all your time.

But better to put all your time into a passion than something you really don’t enjoy!

What career options are there?

Is the work fun?

These are all questions I get asked regularly by students from KG through university.

We spend a lot of time trying to design a career and I am almost certain that that is our greatest downfall.

How do you know what your passion will be next year? So why not concentrate on a variety of passions that might coagulate into the career you are going to fall in love with!

But how do you know what to do? You don’t!

Go with your gut, experiment, take a chance, talk to people, look around and see.

Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media has a great story to tell. First 2 minutes of background.

What does Wilkipedia say about O’Reilly?

O’Reilly was initially interested in literature upon graduating from high school, but after graduating from Harvard College in 1975 with a B.A. cum laude in Classics he became involved in the field of computer user manuals. He defines his company not as a book or online publisher, nor as a conference producer (though the company does all three), but as a technology transfer company, “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.” O’Reilly is on the board of CollabNet, and was on the board of Macromedia until its 2005 merger with Adobe Systems. In March 2007, he joined MySQL AB’s Board of Directors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_O’Reilly

The folks over at Fear-Less, http://fearlessstories.com/, have pulled together some great stories and this comes from their piece on O’Reilly and the start of his career when at University he helped a friend interview some computer guys who were speaking in jargon and really made little sense.

There are three lessons that I took away from that moment. The

first was to be fearless in what you attempt. The job I eventually

mastered was an enormous stretch for me. The second lesson

was that a difficulty is often an opportunity in disguise. I built my

company by bridging the information gap that I first encountered

that day. The third lesson was the importance of serendipity in

your life choices. I never imagined that I’d build a career as a

technical writer, publisher, and entrepreneur. My training was in

Greek and Latin Classics! Agreeing to help out my friend proved

to be a turning point in my life.

There is a lot to be taken from O’Reilly if you are listening!

Today’s gem in the rough was Bono talking about how in 2000 it felt to him like he and the band members were “re-applying” to fans to be U2 the band they had grown to love.

That idea got me thinking about my own tenure as a professor and as a radio host, are we in for life once we get the job OR do we continually need to symbolically re-apply for the position?

Maybe the re-application is through the demonstration of skills, maybe it is through the way we imagine and deliver content, maybe it is through our continual demonstration that we are not just repeating the same old thing but bringing new value to those exercises we are responsible for, be them in the classroom, office or in my case on the radio.

How is the changing world being brought into what I am doing?

And this to me is the big problem today, too few people are in the habit of re-applying for the position they hold, and evaluations do not count unless they are going to see you asked to leave!

Look at what you are doing and ask the simple question, “if I was applying for my job today would I be the candidate most suited for the position?”

If you can not say,”yes”, without question  you are the best candidate for the job and you would hire yourself then you have some work to do!

Business schools do not talk to design schools who do not talk to education schools who do not talk to IT schools and nobody is talking to the cooking schools.

Well, if the core elements of our education system are not relating to each other what chance do you and I have when we leave the ivory tower?

I try to keep up with Tom Peters (and others see the blog-roll on his site for a start) to be grounded in business think, TED to see how the divergent converge and I think it is working.

What we really need to remember is trust in ourselves, we never trust we have anything figured out.

Tom Peters talks about a few people who made trust and circumstance work for them, give it a watch it is very good!

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, what is stopping you from starting that thing?