A humbling subject for me, and one that I'm sure has been brought up before in these forums, but I'm getting to the age where I should REALLY start to worry about my career, and what I want to do. Being in the places and situations I've been in over the last year has shown me that I have a lot of maturing to do.

In any event, to those on this forum that have pursued a career of their own, has it been worth it? How often have your views of what you wanted to do in the past changed before you finally reached a decision?

I'm sure you've heard this before from others, but I've found it to be true: It's not what you know, it's who you know. Network like there's no tomorrow and you'll be alright. Besides that, it's also true that doing something you love/like for less pay is much more rewarding and less stressful than doing something you hate for more money. That said, sometimes you just gotta pay the bills. Each person's situation is uniquely different. Right now I feel like I'm kinda just treading water in my current job. The pay is not awesome, but the benefits of working for a state university are very good. I will bide my time until the right opportunity arrises.

Personally, I can't love what I do for a living; for some reason, I need to separate the things that I love from the things that I deal with on a daily basis (otherwise, I end up resenting the very things that I used to love).

I have a career as an actuary, and while it's not perfect, it's decidedly not bad.  The exams are what bother a lot of people, but they also provide decided measures of achievement.  There is a certain level of knowledge and experience that you can expect from any actuary, mainly because every actuary had to go through the rigors of the exam process and demonstrate proficiency in a variety of areas.  Career advancement in my profession is strongly linked to exam progress in the early years, and I like that sort of structure.  I am also very good at taking exams (course 8V notwithstanding), so that helped a lot as well.  It's not a profession where you need to interact with the public (which I'm not sure I would be able to handle), it has very reasonable hours and great pay, even for non-management roles.  One downside is that you're basically limited to living in big cities or the Midwest, since the majority of actuarial work is for insurance companies (which are either in big cities, or are sitused in states with favorable insurance departments, like Illinois or Ohio).

Do I regret what I'm doing now?  Not when I consider what might have happened if I would have continued on the career path I was on when I was 22; in grad school for chemistry, a subject that I was great at theoretically but horrible at in a laboratory setting.  I thought I would be able to overcome my inherent clumsiness in the lab with time, but I did not, and got more and more depressed as I broke more and more things.  I need to have short-term feedback, which I was definitely not getting as a chemist.

I've thought about what else I might like to do, and I might enjoy doing other things in the financial sector, like retirement planning or investment analysis.  I've also toyed with the idea of working as a teacher in a country that doesn't seem to be falling apart due to over-regulation of every aspect of life, though emigration is a far more difficult process today than it used to be.

Question 1: Not yet. I originally went to a Community College, decided I wanted to get into journalism, ended up paying out the ass in both time and money to discover I didn't want to make a career feasting on other people's misery and defending myself using such a shallow code of ethics and the stupid "freedom of speech/the press" excuse so many irresponsible journalists fall back on. Plus the pay is lousy and I was looking at print journalism, which is a bitch to break into. Figure I wasted $18000 in rent and have $10000 in loans to pay off, plus all off-campus expenses for three years.

Question 2: See above. The good part is that I was fortunate enough to find work in a payroll office after that. I never saw myself as being an accountant, but looking into it further, doing stuff with it and talking with people there, I'm pretty sure that's what I want to get into. So right now, I'm back in college and learning the fundamentals (although the stuff I do at work is far more advanced than what I'm learning...never thought taxes would actually be fun.) and what employers are looking for and what software to learn. The option is there to rack up another huge college bill, since there's a good demand for good accountants and the positions pay well (plus I have all of my "fundamental" courses complete from my first college run).

It could be worse: Back when I was 12 or 13, I wanted to be a pro-wrestler.

"Pro" wrestlers make a lot of money, yo.

Yeah, if you find a gimmick that works and you can convince the promoters to give you a break. Otherwise, the payday isn't so good, especially on the independants. I enjoy wrestling more nowadays because I understand the backstage politics all the more (though I'll never understand John Cena's push).

I don't want a career or a job. I want a little place I can study in and be cut off from the human race; I'm a claustrophile.
I don't have a college degree and the notion of obtaining one makes me irate. I spent some time in college and it only made me angry, except for Latin (that was fun). Do you know what would be heaven for me? Packing my bags and going to elsewhere, studying the language of that elsewhere and moving on to another elsewhere, ad infinitum.

Grade school was worth my time. I learned things in that place. High school made me angry, since I already had reading capability by that time. The point is - since I can read, if I want to learn it, then I will. Seems logical to me. But not to the U.S. government. They assume that human minds are empty and school will fill minds with information. The problem with minds is that they are very full. Full of questions. Rather than assuming that minds are empty, the school system would function better if it addressed those questions.

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the park's big chasm

..Just leave dem kids alone.

I'd be curious as to who would pay for your living expenses while you study, Jodo.

As for careers, here's my 2 cents, which may not be worth even that as my own experience is pretty limited:

I guess one of the first things I'd be asking is why do you want a career? What is it you expect to get from it? If it's simply to pay your bills or make money, I'd say that's probably easy enough - it's a job. The nice thing about a job you're only doing for money is that you can leave it behind when you go home. That's a big bonus.

But I'd say a 'career' is probably more than that. If it's something you want to devote time and mental energy to then I'd reiterate what Bamatone said - "something you love/like for less pay is much more rewarding and less stressful than doing something you hate for more money". In the real world, I guess we can't always do what we want - there just aren't enough champagne taster positions going. But that's no reason to stop striving to achieve your goals.

And I mean your goals. Not the goals that society tells you that you should be reaching for.

Aside from the reason Bamatone gave about basic satisfaction, there is another very good reason for this. Good jobs are pretty rare. Great jobs are even rarer. There are positions that people will never give up and they'd have to die to make a spot available. When they do, there will be hundreds of very talented people looking to fill that position. If you're really going to go for a career, you need to be good. Very good. And it's a hell of a lot easier to get good at something you love.

If you do that then, to answer your question, yes it's worth it. I'm doing it and it's worth it. Of course I still don't want to get up in the morning but probably even the pro-wrestlers are the same.

To answer your second question, I firmly believe that it's never too late to change career. So if you train or work your way up in a job and decide you don't like it, you can always retrain or move to a different job. You'll always build up skills that will benefit you. My mother took on a career in her late forties that she had never touched before and is now very successful. I have seen several people decide in their thirties to abandon what would be considered very successful careers to go back to college and study something they always wanted to do (usually following that pattern of less money but much more satisfaction). I dropped out of university myself early on realising that what I was doing just wasn't right for me.

If you find something you like now, I wouldn't worry about whether you'll like it in five or ten years. There's a very good chance you will change your mind at some point. That's cool. It's never too late to shift career.

My advice would be to aks yourself what you want to do. Not what you want to do from a conventional choice of accountant, lawyer or whatever. What you really want to do. Then start hunting for information. Some things don't even sound like real jobs but, scratch the surface, and you can be almost sure that someone, somewhere, is making a living from it.

Hmm...career.

Careers are bad.  I really think people should get out of the mindset of specializing in one thing and one thing alone.

Unless you are extremely good at it, and I mean, extremely good. 

But even so, if you look at the great minds of the past, they were generalists.  Newton, Franklin, etc etc etc.

People should be well rounded and be able to perform anything, in any career.  Or more than one, at least.

College education may help, for those who need the mentorship or the extra-push in the direction, but it isn't needed.

I have no career.  I have been in the military for 5 years now.  But it is not my career.  I am due to get out in 10 months. 
And while I do have a bachelors degree and several certifications, it by no means limits me to those specialties.

When I get out, I plan on traveling.  First, I will spend 4 months in Russia, doing whatever I can do to meet the standard of living, while learning the culture and language.  I have always wanted to learn Cyrillic and speak the language.  Then I will spend 3 more months in Italy, and learn that.  From there, who knows--most likely Poland.  And eventually getting a PhD or MD; but never limiting myself to a narrow scope of practice.

Exactly where I am going with this may be unclear, but, careers limit people. 

Do what is good.

Do not do what is not good.

LoL!
Classic.

In heaven, one does not have expenses.

Ah okay. Live the dream man!

Here's how that can happen (this is my very own patented 'Jay's Theory of Robotic Advancement') - in the fifties or whenever, people imagined a world in which robots did all the work. Why hasn't this happened? Becauses people are greedy shits. If a computer/robot/machine could do a job better or faster than a person, that person would be dumped out on his ass and the profits would go to the top of the chain.

A bad and shortsighted idea. All it means is a greater divide between rich and poor and there's a whole section of society who, quite rightly, would resist progress in technology.

Here's what should happen - if a computer/robot/machine can do the job of a man, that man should be replaced by it. His yearly salary should still be paid to him and his family, minus the running costs of the machine. One by one, we would slowly but surely be replaced. It would be in our own interests to find better technology to replace our own jobs. Eventually, all work would be done and managed by robots. The payments wouldn't mean anything any more because we would all be provided for. Humanity would be free to explore the arts, explore ourselves and maybe explore the Universe.

That's my dream.

From what little bits I can remember about my old History classes, didn't the Greek Philosophers have ample time to lounge around and explore the arts and tell stories all day?...   One could look into what made their gigs possible, although slave labor and heavy taxation probably had something to do with it, so uhhhh.... nevermind. 

And robots would be our slaves. So it's already a proven system. What could go wrong?

Unless...they rise up and destroy their human masters...

It seems that your dream would eliminate the middle class, or maybe even create a new class. Your dream is far closer to reality than mine and I think robots will replace most jobs, all the way down to prostitutes. We've already moved from an agrarian society to a sales based society. Next will be a maintenance society, where we maintain our work force of machines. Too much automation would degenerate our skills and knowledge, so it might not be good to develop a machine class that runs the machines. That would really leave us with nothing to do.

  Eventually, the people with jobs are going to die. When a new generation of humans is born into a society with few jobs, how will their incomes be decided? Most importantly, what would be the point of an income?

Well that's the thing - the income would only be important in the short term. And it would go to families rather than just the individuals. Once automation got to a point where all of the 'paid' people could be provided for, the process would continue in order to provide for the unpaid people - those people who didn't have jobs or whatever. So at that point, income becomes irrelevant.

Aside from all the little flaws (of which there are many), the one thing keeping this from happening is that greed factor. Why would a CEO pay someone not to work when he could pay himself more instead? That's unlikely to change any time soon and yet, in my opinion, it seems self-destructive when you take humanity as a whole. It will always limit us.

If we get over that at some stage, well, it's robot time!

As for having nothing to do, I disagree. You, for example, would have that freedom to study what you want and advance your knowledge. You'd have your heaven. I would explore music and art and would hope to catch up on astronomy, something that I just can't do with the whole having to work for a living thing. We could advance ourselves as human beings. Learn. Explore. Progress. Not because we have to sell crap to people who don't need it or screw over our fellow man or excel at warfare or whatever. Just because we want to.

That's real freedom.

Yes, that is a critical problem. But at least we'd eliminate slavery. And keep some diseases in check. People having sex with robots, rather than visiting traditional brothels, would walk out worry free. Murders due to job related stress, as in the case of postal and factory workers, would be eliminated. Smaller countries run by disturbed people, such as North Korea, would pose minor problems by creating droid armies and letting them run amuck. Maybe I should use the word "android". These armies would be indistinguishable from real soldiers, so the technology behind creating life-like robots would need to be very carefully monitored.