How to Change Jobs When You Don't Know What To Do
If you're like many people, you may know that your current job or career choice isn't right for you... yet, you may not know what else to do.
To help you discover what job or career you should be doing, you may think about what you would like to do. But oftentimes, asking yourself what you want or would like to do actually draws a blank. Unfortunately, the question “what do I want to do?” often implies that there is one, definitive answer, when in reality, there may not be one definitive answer. In fact, you may have one answer at one point in your life, only to have it change several times throughout your job or career. Or you may have a handful of answers at once. Or you may simply stumble over the question altogether because you just can't come up with any answer.
If you find the question of what you want to do difficult to answer then maybe it's time to ask yourself a different question. What do you want to learn? That being the case, here's an exercise to help you determine what your next career move should be (whether it really is choosing a new career, or somehow modifying your current job or career): find some paper, or load up Notepad on your computer, and make a list of all the career or job-related knowledge and skills you want to develop. Now, arrange each thing you want to learn in order of priority. Having done that, your final task is to do some research: find out what jobs or careers you can pursue that will allow you to acquire the skills and knowledge you want to learn when you want to learn them.
Of course, no job, career or employer will necessarily teach you everything you want to learn. And you may change in terms of what you want to learn too. So be prepared to update your list.
Nevertheless, for right now, you know what you want to learn now... and which jobs or careers will most probably enable you to learn it.
Now, the assumption behind this process is that what you want to learn is the best indicator of your next career move... and will ultimately help you find the right job(s) or career(s) (remembering that there might be more than one "right" job or career over the course of your professional life). However, I think it's a fair assumption to make when it's a matter of making the leap from unsatisfying work to a truly rewarding job or career.
Therefore, stop trying to find an answer to the question of what you want to do. Go through the fun exercise above and let your answers as to what you want to learn guide you towards the right job(s) and/or career(s) for you.
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