#and now I'm in the position of Temporary Move To London For Work and I'm just

[tmae3114]

"How are you enjoying London?"

"I have listened to six different artists' covers of Dougie MacLean's Caledonia in the past two weeks"

"Oh, you've got The Yearning"

"I have The Yearning so badly yeah"

[openpassionates]

ALTHOUGH SHE MAY be biased, venus thinks that rafael will have a great time in la when he returns. she doesn't think that he likes it too much if he was able to return to his hometown of london but she enjoyed his temporary time there. "how about you just come to la whenever you want to? i'd never ask someone to get on a long flight like that. it's just not right. you have family here. family is important to me more than anything. i can be selfish but not to that extent. so whenever you come back to la, I'll be happy to help you by showing you around and stuff but the compromise doesn't work for me." she knows that they aren't comparable given that her family consists of her children but he clearly moved back for a reason. venus rises from the bed so she could grab her cosmetic bag before coming back to assume her previous position. "this is so silly. i already washed my face and everything and it'll just come off. but if you like it, then I'll do whatever you want. you should record me. this is your goodbye lipstick application." giggles continue to escape from venus' lips due to how she's practically preparing to kiss rafael. she moves so that she's now straddling his lap and using his torso to set her lipstick and glosses of choice down. "that wine hit me like a truck." she comments. her caution towards their friendship was dwindling by the minute. "okay, you need to remember that you said that because you know, i'm still scared a little. if we go further than kissing, i don't want things to get weird. because i don't mind making out or having sex but i can't lose a friend." venus tells him with full vulnerability. she can't promise that their drunken words will still hold up once everything is said and done.

venus is right. london is where he fits in the best and la is a bit of a culture shock. rafael thinks that living somewhere new-ish would be be good for him in the long run, considering how rough his personal life has been as of late. “la is good for me when things get tough here… not like an escape, but my friends in la are different, the food is different. it’s less heavy in la and of course i get to see you. that’s fun.” holding her hand is his new favorite thing to do and it always happens organically. he’s always reaching for her. she’s so thoughtful in how she worries about how jet lag will effect him. he can only chuckle. “i will come to la whenever you ask me to. how about that as a compromise? you ask, i hop on the flight and spend a few weeks there. i wanna get used to la too so, that’ll help. you’d be helping me.” his dimpled grin makes an appearance as they make eye contact. he wants the friendship to last, but he really wants to kiss her again. “i’d say yes, but i just really wanna kiss you. i don’t think you should be too scared. it’s risky, but i respect our new friendship and i respect you. if we kissed i’d still feel the same respect and i only will kiss you if you want.” the kiss on his cheeks again is unexpected, but he isn’t complaining. “personally, i like the gloss and lipstick.”

[noona-la-la-la]

Hey noona, can I ask what line of work you do because it honestly sounds great. I'm majoring in business and english at the same time so I can get a job where I can travel a lot but honestly have no idea where the hell I can find a job like that :/ your work life sounds so nice. Any tips?

I won’t say what I do for a living because my anonymity is important and I think people here really underestimate how easy it is to stitch together who a person is and how to find them from just a few pieces of information.  So, details regarding my profession are going to remain a secret. 

I’m glad that my work life sounds nice to you, but I’ll say it is utterly exhausting.  I have no balance, I work all the time.  Don’t get me wrong – I actually really enjoy the work I do, but there is almost no room for anything else.  That’s the primary reason it’s been so long since I’ve written any new fic content or why I’m so far behind on responding to asks.  

However, if getting a job where you travel a lot is a goal for you, it really doesn’t matter what you get your degree in.  It matters where you end up working and how you leverage your capabilities to get into a position that requires travel.

I’ll share some thoughts under the cut (assuming the cut function on Tumblr is even still working…)

Here’s the thing that I think a lot of students and new grads don’t really get about the professional world:  no matter what job you start with, it is possible through hard work, taking advantage of opportunities, strategic planning and being really smart with your choices, you can turn that into what the average person would consider a successful and prestigious career.  And while I’m here, I’ll just say that I fully understand that some people by virtue of their birth can just stumble into high paying and high powered jobs while others have to bust their asses to a ridiculous degree just to get a little further ahead.  This is true.  But my point is really that you aren’t limited by your degree choice or by where you land your first job.  And simply working hard won’t be enough if you want to get ahead or achieve whatever goals you are setting for yourself professionally.  It’s about smart, savvy decision making.  It’s about working hard while simultaneously developing the right network, being politically astute, knowing when to jump to a better opportunity, how to gain the right experience that you can then leverage for your next step, self promotion, and a lot of other stuff that they generally don’t teach you in a class room.  Also, remember that not everyone has the same goals and priorities.  One person’s dream is another person’s nightmare.  You need to know what it is that you are aiming for.

So, in your case, you think you want a job that has a lot of travel involved.  

The quick way to get there:  get a job in a consulting firm.  You will rarely even be home.  But be warned – it can be brutal to be on the road that much.

But here’s some examples of people I know that ended up in high travel jobs through means that most people wouldn’t have expected.

A college friend wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life after graduation and just kept working as a server at the same restaurant chain he worked at during college while he tried to figure it out.  One day this restaurant asked him to go to a training class because they were getting new software for their registers and they wanted him to learn how to use it and then come back and train the rest of the staff in the restaurant.  He did such a good job that they recommended him to the headquarters to do training on a regional basis (so here he is traveling around the region).  Then in a matter of months, he became the subject matter expert in this software for the national chain.  He managed to use this experience to get a job with the software manufacturer and started training new clients on the software all over the US.  He was so good at his job and savvy about positioning himself in the company, that he eventually moved from training to project management.  And then leveraged that to start working on different types of software projects, at which point he started traveling globally. He’s now living in Paris and jet setting across the world.  Which is a long ways away from where he started as a waiter in a chain restaurant in a small college town.

Another woman I know had a job at a bank.  She saw an opportunity to work on a project rolling out a new work model for the bank across all it’s branches.  Most people didn’t want to do it because it was a lot of extra work on top of doing your regular job, but she decided to volunteer.  As a result she ended up working alongside a group of change management consultants that the bank hired to help with the project.  They built such good relationships that when the project was over, she talked to the consultants about her career aspirations and they liked her so much they put her in contact with another banking client who wanted someone to do a similar project for them in the US.  Since she came highly recommended by people in this prestigious consulting firm, this other bank took a chance on her and hired her for their project.  Then they liked her so much, they moved her to Hong Kong to do the same thing for their Asian divisions.  That’s where she developed relationships with other expats in the area who clued her in to a job opportunity in London and moved there.  

Another person I know had a regular person job but also did some volunteer work on the side.  He was particularly interested in issues of social justice.  Through his volunteer work, he met a lot of interesting people in positions of authority and he decided to start his own non-profit that focused on a particular issue of interest to him.  I don’t want to say too much about this guy because his story is so unique, but through his drive, intelligence and charisma – he ended up quitting his regular person job to focus on his passions, has been on the boards of multiple non-profits, does public speaking engagements, and last I heard is traveling the globe on behalf of a major trust organization to review organizations applying for grants.

I know a guy who was just really into golf and decided to get a 2 year associates degree in turf management (honest-to-god that’s a real thing), became a head groundskeeper at some fancy golf course.  But through developing his knowledge base in the science of growing grass, making connections and being savvy, he’s now going around to different golf courses all over the pace as a consultant to help them figure out how to grow better grass or whatever.  It still blows my mind that this is a thing people do.

A friend started out selling shoes at a department store and managed to work her way up to a management role and then eventually into a regional management role and now she’s in charge of certain types of contract negotiations at stores all over the country and traveling regularly.

I know multiple people who are nurses, physical therapists or other types of health care professionals who travel to health care facilities all over the country (and sometimes all over the world) to take temporary positions in their respective professions.  There is a whole industry built around this.  Traveling health care providers is a real thing.

Heck, my Uber driver yesterday was a woman who started out as a teacher in the United States, but decided that she wanted to travel.  She just got back from Southeast Asia where she worked in several countries over the past 7 years.  She said she got over there as an English teacher, but because she had experience and credentials from her time as a teacher in the USA, she was able to leverage that to get a job as a teacher in International Schools in the countries where she lived.

I’m in a job where I travel and I don’t even really want to be traveling.  It just happened.  I don’t mind doing it once in a while, but I’d be perfectly happy if tomorrow they told me that I never had to go somewhere else ever again.

This got realllllllllllllllly long.  But the real moral of this story is that there are multiple ways for people to meet their travel goals.  This is true of pretty much any goal.  So don’t freak out if you don’t know how to get what you want right away.  Just get out into the world and keep your eyes open and take on as many opportunities as you can as a way to work towards what you really want.