Significant Career Lesson From an Account Manager at ELREPCO
Aman's most significant career lesson involved trusting their intuition: "following your gut on when you feel like you're not in the right place," leading them to abandon a planned engineering career despite societal pressures, ultimately discovering and excelling in a field that better suited their talents and passions. This involved taking "the risk to go out there and figure out what I'm really good at doing."
Career Exploration, Career Development, Overcoming Challenges, Self-Reflection, Risk Taking
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Aman Sheth
Account Manager
ELREPCO
Purdue University Class of 2019
Currently pursuing MBA at UCLA Anderson
Engineering - Mechanical
Electronics & Semiconductors
Sales and Client Management
Immigrant
Video Highlights
1. Trust your intuition about your career path and be decisive in making changes if needed
2. It's okay to change career paths if you discover your initial choice isn't the right fit
3. Identify your strengths and focus on developing expertise in a specific area to achieve career success
Transcript
What is one lesson you have learned in your career that has proven significant?
I think following your gut on when you feel like you're not in the right place is super important. Being decisive and listening to your body telling you, "Hey, I enjoy doing this" or "I don't enjoy doing this," or "Hey, I think I'm great at doing this" or "This is really not what I was built to do."
Really paying attention to that and reflecting on that earlier in your career is so important. The second part of that would be having the guts to actually take action on that.
For me, my whole life, I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I went to school to be a mechanical engineer and worked for a year as an engineer during my co-op. I realized I actually hate doing this, and I'm not very good at doing this either.
So, this thing that I thought my whole life I was building towards turns out I didn't like it and I wasn't good at it. There were two options I had at that point. One, I could continue on the safe path, which is I know I'm not very good at this, but I could still get job offers in this field and do an okay job.
Or, I could take the risk to go out there and figure out what I'm really good at doing, what I'm naturally good at doing, and then double down on that thing that I've discovered. Hopefully, that happens to any of the listeners: you take the risk if you don't feel like you're somewhere you really want to be.
Then you figure out whether you're good at whatever you're trying to figure out. If you figure out that you enjoy doing it, you double down, you train, and you get great at this one very particular thing.
If you want to be financially well off, I think it's important that you figure out what you're really great at doing. You don't want to float through life in mediocrity. Everyone's good at something. I thought if I couldn't be an engineer, I couldn't even imagine what else I could do. It's important to spend your early 20s doing that reflection journey.