When I chose what to study at A level and at University I chose what I was best at. I never considered not doing further and higher education until I was at University, but the best motivators for me to stay in Uni were the lousy student jobs I had.

Studying chemistry at Uni I did a 15 month placement with a chemicals firm as an applications chemist. This involved solving problems for customers using the company's products. I lucked out on my first project, creating a novel windscreen coating for scooters (!) and netting the company £¾ million. I really enjoyed the problem solving and organisational aspects of the job.

The thing I learned was that the main issues are not chemical, but having the ability to see the whole system within which your product will work. An example was an overly expensive paper coating that worked out as economic because of desirable properties elsewhere on the production line.

They sponsored me through my final year dissertation, but when I graduated the money was in IT and I had a stack of debt. Thus, I applied for and got a job at Siebel Systems as a trainee IT consultant. I got a decent salary and share options in a very fast growing company. As I got stuck in I realised that I'd have to move jobs to get promoted as quickly as I wanted, so 14 months later I was off to another IT consultancy, BroadVision. Here I got thoroughly involved in the technical side, which I had neither the aptitude nor ability for. However meanwhile the IT job market had crashed and there was no way I could earn the same money by going into a different sector.

This went on until I got made redundant. Fortunately I was quickly taken on by the client I was working for at the time, and started in a progressively less and less technical generalist role in electronic publishing. Some of the role was project based, and some operations management, it gave me a lot of experience very quickly, and then plateaued. Since the money was good and the hours very reasonable I was content to stay for a while, and started doing lots of learning, starting and completing my philosophy A level and starting my OU course. Arrod.co.uk was born at the same time and it all seemed fairly peachy.

However, it wasn't terribly fulfilling and I was worried that my cushy job wasn't improving my employability. Then I got moved to a different manager who was a real bully and I knew I had to get out to protect my sanity.

I was then confronted with the mid-twenties crisis:
I feel unfulfilled, but I don't know what the hell it is that I want to do.

The personal development work got kicked up several notches, I went on a slew of courses run by the council, but by far the most influential was an NLP course. I think the reason it worked was that it forced me to look at what I really wanted to do. It helped me to examine what it was that really got me motivated and passionate.

Previously I had focussed on what I was really good at. The thing is if you're half-way intelligent you can become good at anything given time. What is important is to do something you love.

This led to the most significant change in me, the decision that I had to do something I loved. Up until then the success of career was measured in how impressed people were and whether I earned more than them.

However, the main problem was knowing what I wanted to do, I'd been unhappy I work before and changed jobs, but just ended up unhappy at another place. How would I know what I loved doing?

I consciously tried to worry less about what people thought, and cast the net really wide. I looked at anything that might provide me with sufficient income to live and give me freedom. I considered training to become a locksmith or a plumber.

What I was doing was looking at the different aspects of my life and realising that the work aspect was not fulfilling, I was seeking to minimise it in my life so I could get on with the other aspects I liked more.

This gave me a clue for knowing what I had to do, and it came to me in s elf-reflective exercise in my OU course. I love learning. Work just got in the way of the learning, and was just a method to earn money to get some more learning.

Thus one of my goals had to be to get a job that would encourage me in life-long learning.

OK, so I have one criterion, but I still don't know what I want to do. However I do have very strong feelings on how a company should be run and how it should treat it's employees.

So, the conclusion was that I didn't know what I wanted to do. The reason was that the exact detail didn't bother me very much. The motivator was to learn and work with a company that had strong values that matched mine.

The hunt was on.

The next trouble was knowing who to apply to, how to do it and what to send them. Job hunt journey

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