How much should a company’s culture factor into your decision to work there? A lot it turns out. Civil engineer turned software developer Aimi Elias explains the importance of feeling like you fit into your workplace and the role culture plays in your day-to-day job satisfaction. Afterwards, I’ll share my own thoughts on how culture has had an impact on me during my own professional pivots.

Aimi’s actually a long-time listener of this show, and we first connected when she dropped me a note last year mentioning how Career Relaunch podcast episode 8 (featuring Zai Divecha) got her thinking about her own moments of flow, including those moments when she lost track of time as a teenager tinkering around with code. Now, many years later, she’s tapped back into her own flow state working on software development and machine learning at Sky.

Key Career Takeaways

1. Although a job can sound “cool” and interesting on paper, it doesn’t mean the day-to-day realities of that work will necessarily be interesting to you.
2. The cultural influences of your company can have a huge impact on your day-to-day satisfaction and comfort in a job.
3. While securing a sought-after certification or credential in your field may seem like a way of dealing with job dissatisfaction, it only goes so far if you’re still fundamentally misplaced in the wrong sector.

Tweetables to Share

Resources

• Interested in shifting into a tech career? Learn more about Sky’s Get into Tech programme that Aimi mentioned.

Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of considering whether your current job is moving you closer to or farther from the type of person you want to be in your life and career. Do you like the person you’re becoming? Or do you feel more like you’re having to put on an act to fit into your role or organisation by being someone you’re not?

If you feel like your work is turning you into someone you don’t like, aside from actually leaving that job behind, consider what change you could make to your way of working, your mindset about work, or your attitude toward your job that could enable you to live your life in a way that makes you proud, or at the