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To Find Your Direction, Check Your Career Compass
For any young person looking towards the future, following your career compass is sound advice. But how do you figure out where and in what direction you want that compass to lead you? Important clues come from asking yourself what kinds of challenges, interests, values and passions ignite your imagination.
Rachael Hoagland’s first job after college—working in a university admissions office—began to point her towards some of the goals she had set for herself. For example, she wanted to help others (which she did when she assisted prospective students) and to be part of a community or organization that worked together to achieve a common good (education, for instance). What was missing, she felt, was the sense of being continually challenged, both physically and mentally, and the opportunity, as she put it, “to see where my limits were.” She also wanted to serve some greater purpose. And she had the urge to travel. Seeing in the U.S. Army an organization that would offer the chance to fulfill all these goals, she enlisted.
That experience soon led her to develop another goal—becoming a US Army Officer. As a Private working as an administrative clerk, she noticed and was impressed by the wide range of leadership responsibilities that Army Officers took on, not just training Soldiers in specific tasks but acting as mentors and teachers, helping Soldiers find whatever educational programs, or financial aid, or medical care or counseling they might need. Becoming an Officer, she perceived, would not only further her self-development and desire to keep on learning, but—just, if not more important--it would also further her ability to “be part of something bigger, something that helped people,” she says. She went to officer training school and became a Second Lieutenant in the military intelligence branch in December 1999.
The training was tough, but the result has been more than fulfilling. “From the day you step in as an Officer you are given an immense amount of responsibility,” expected to display a high level of leadership and initiative, she says. “You are in charge of everything from training your group of Soldiers to making sure they have proper gear and transportation” to finding resources to help them resolve any personal problems. And because you have to know in advance what they’ll need to do their jobs well, “you’re constantly seeking self-improvement, not for yourself but for the betterment of the organization and for the Soldiers.”
As for Hoagland’s travel bug, in her years as an Officer, she has traveled to 50 countries all over the world, whether on army business or as a tourist. (Among the few places still on her must-visit wish list: Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica.) Her military assignments have taken her to Germany, Kosovo, Macedonia, Israel, Quatar and Iraq, where she was deployed during the initial ground war in 2003. Now a Major, she currently is posted at West Point, where in addition to being an instructor she helps cadets figure out the direction of their own career paths as Army Officers. “I help them realize that regardless what particular job or posting they have, they are going to succeed and there is a lot of good to be done,” she says.
Her advice to anyone considering a career as an Army Officer? Self-assessment. We all have different abilities and skills and interests, so start by asking yourself what do you want to do with your life? That’s what she did, and the answers have led her to where she is today.
