SINGAPORE: More and more people in Singapore appear to be turning to Reddit for career advice these days, especially young employees who want to hear from those who’ve had the benefit of years of experience.
In a post on the r/askSingapore subreddit, a young woman asked: “Should I quit my job for the sake of my career?”
U/Maximum_Conflict501 explained that she is now 25 and is currently in her second job. She majored in Computer Science at a private institute.
The post author explained that she found her first job as a sales admin at a small company “really boring.” Her present corporate job is not as boring as it’s a little more complex, but she still described it as “basically just documentation and support,” and is something that she doesn’t see herself doing a decade from now.
She also said she can’t really complain about the salary, since she did not graduate from Singapore’s top three universities, but added that she does not want to be “stuck at being a support forever.”
“Should I just quit and try something else from the start (I have 1.5 years’ work experience now) or just stay and get some experience? I fear that at the end of the day, this experience would take me nowhere… my hope is to be a pm (project manager) someday,” she added.
Most of the top-rated advice came from Reddit users who told her that it would be better to start a different career track as soon as possible.
“1.5 years as a sales admin =/= 1.5 sales as a tech career. If you want to do tech, you do tech. If you wanna do sales admin, you do sales admin. Better to switch early,” one wrote.
Another agreed: “If I’m hiring a junior dev, I would rather choose a fresh grad than someone working as a sales admin for 1.5 years. The longer you work in a non-related job, the harder it is for you to go back because it’s a fair assumption that you have already forgotten your tech knowledge.”
“Whenever this kind of question comes up, I always say the same thing: The Japanese quote — ‘If you get on the wrong train, get off at the first stop. The longer you stay, the more costly the return trip becomes.’
Don’t let people scare you with the usual ‘market bad, hold job first’ nonsense. I’d rather you leave, be jobless for a while, do some part-time, and focus FULLY on applying for the job you actually want. You can even do internships to break into a new track. The last thing you want is to panic later and settle for any random job just because the fear of unemployment hits you. Right now, you do not have a loan or a family to feed. This brings less worry about having to bring food to the table,” another advised. /TISG
