5 steps to turn your passion into a job
- Mar 11, 2018
- Written by Ken
Dream job: 5 steps to turn your passion into a job
Check out these top dream jobs you never even knew existed.
If you have something you love to do, there are ways to make it your profession.
· The average American worker puts in 38.7 hours a week and works 46.8 weeks during the year, according to a Pew analysis of Labor Department data. Some workers bypass that number with 40% regularly working more than 50 hours per week, and 20% working more than 60 hours each week.
· That’s a lot of hours to put in at a job if it’s not your passion. Some people, of course, are lucky enough that what they do for work is what they love. If you’re not one of those people — and you’re someone who counts the hours until you can leave work to get to your hobby — there is hope.
· In many cases, you can turn your passion into a career. Doing so, however, requires having a plan, being aggressive, and sometimes making sacrifices.
1. Do a self-evaluation
Just because you love brewing beer on the weekends does not mean you want to turn that into a job. Before starting on a path to turn your passion into a career, you need to evaluate if that’s something you really want.
Be honest. In some cases, our hobbies bring us joy because we only get to spend limited time on them. You may love knitting or model trains, but you should really consider whether being part of that activity all day long will take the fun out of it.
2. Identify what the relevant jobs are
I love books and would happily read for a living if that was an option. Since it’s not, I had to examine what the actual jobs in the field are. In theory, I could work at or manage a bookstore, I could edit for a publisher, or try my hand at being a full-time author.
None of those appealed to me all that much, so I ended up as a writer. Call it a book-adjacent field, but by looking at my options, I decided on none of the above and kept my passion for books as a hobby while entering a related field.
3. Learn what you need