Marjolein van Kraanen, 12-04-1984, The Netherlands
I was sitting in a job coach’s office, for the first time in my life at 36, after being laid off for the first time in my life, rather expecting him to look through my cv and job experience to see what sort of things I was good at, and what sort of job that meant I should pursue. Instead, he asked me one thing: What is important to you?
It was late 2020 in The Netherlands, during what we now know was one of the brief interludes between Covid-19 lockdowns where things were starting to look up for a while, and face-to-face appointments were allowed.
I had lost my job of 13 years not long before – one of thousands of people whose employers could not afford to keep on staff if there was no work. Mine was an events organizer, professional and academic workshops and conferences rather than purely entertainment, though of course Covid-19 did not care much for that distinction. There was no one at fault, but it still left me with the consequence: how do I find a new job, without running into the same problem some time down the line, if (when) the pandemic kept on much longer? Clearly, I could not stay in the events business, but I had no idea how to go about finding out where I could go.
I’d found the job coach through my union, who had advertised a government programme for people – well, for people like me. Free job coaching, for ten sessions, sounded at the very least like it couldn’t hurt. I had very little idea what to expect, as the last time I had any ‘coaching’ was fresh out of university when I didn’t have a job lined up right away, and the unemployment office sent me on temp jobs until they came across a job opening that would become mine for the next 13 years.
The coach’s name was Richard, and he had a friendly, approachable air to him, but as I soon found out he was not afraid to ask hard questions. We started out with some personality tests, and I was given homework for each session – mostly tools and questionnaires designed to get me to think about past experiences, both personal and professional, both positive and negative, and how they affected me, and what that meant for my future.
This was tougher than I thought it would be! I am naturally a person who spends a lot of time in her own company and I always thought I had a good sense of who I am and what I wanted or didn’t want. But I had never taken the time to sit down and look back at big moments in my life in a structured way, or picture a life going forward. I’d had plans, sure – I wanted to study English, I wanted a job where I could utilize that knowledge, I met my husband and knew I wanted a future with him – but asked to look ahead to when I’m 60 and what sort of life I envisioned for myself, I came up blank.
Partly this didn’t worry me too much, as I’ve also always been a very ‘go with the flow’ kind of person, and not everything needs to be planned out. But immersing myself in these questions, really sitting with them, made me realise that I had no real answers to the ‘what’ or ‘when’.
The ‘who’ was easy, as I’ve been picturing the rest of my life together with my husband since about the day I met him, and whatever additions to our family life would give us.
I talked to Richard about not really having ‘what’ or ‘when’ answers to the question of what the future might hold, somehow feeling ashamed about it. I’d never really pictured or planned ahead that way, after all, and was suddenly feeling like maybe I should have been all along. But Richard, with all his experience coaching people like me, punched through to the heart of the matter: if not ‘what’ or ‘when’, what about the ‘how’?
How would I like to live my life? Surprisingly, the answer to that was easy: I wanted to live a happy life, doing something I loved doing, with like-minded people. What, exactly, ‘doing something I loved’ entailed, was not a question that needed a specific answer, since interests change, and mine are broad to begin with. The important bit here, Richard offered, was ‘happiness’, in however form that would come. And the key to finding happiness such as that, is to surround yourself with people who have the same goal.
In other words, and this is boiling down ten sessions of self-discovery fraught with more emotions than I can put on the page here, I had to look for employers who shared my philosophy, my wish for happiness. What’s more, I had to start doing this intentionally – at any job interview, both parties are looking for happiness in some way, but in the absence of specific material goals such as particular job titles, status or salary, making increased happiness my explicit goal was going to help me find it much faster.
And, it did.
After the job coaching ended, and Richard and I parted ways, I was still continuing my search for a ‘what’, though now with a better sense of how to recognize something that would make me happy with I found it, and how to figure out if the company and I would be a good match.
Unfortunately, jobs that had some sort of match with things I had done in the past were not in great demand at that time, and the job-searching work itself was definitely not increasing my happiness, between clunky vacancy websites, unclear application procedures, and, surprisingly more than once, a perfect-sounding position that turned out to not actually exist anymore.
It was Richard’s coaching that gave me the confidence to voice these frustrations to my contact at the unemployment office, and lo and behold, her response was to say, ‘Did you know that testing software is a career, and also I know a company that might be interested to talk with you if you’d like to find out more?’
Just a quick google of what software testing was like showed me that it ticked a lot of my happiness boxes, and so I asked her to help me get in touch with that company. A short time after, I received a call from Joeri Kraaijestein at Beround, and two months later I was working for him.
Looking back, as devastating as losing my previous job was, I can only conclude that it was, in the end, a wonderful opportunity as well. It was the perfect time to do some reflection and really immerse myself in my own past experiences and what that meant for what I wanted out of the future. And knowing that my goal was ‘something I can be happy doing’ allowed me to be upfront towards my unemployment agent about the things I was unhappy with. This honesty, perhaps even vulnerability, allowed her in turn to offer a suggestion that proved pivotal and led to a new career that is indeed making me happy, working for a company whose goals and values match my own.
I still have much to learn, as a software tester, but that is part of the fun – and something new to immerse myself in. We’ll see where it will lead me this time!
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