If this question isn’t the most popular of all time, it has to be close: “How is your job going?”.

Inevitably the kosher answer to this question is, “It’s going good”.

Rarely do you get the outlier event of a person telling you how much they LOVE what they are doing.  And if they do tell you that, they probably are a bit disillusioned about what they are doing and their impact outside of their 4 walls.  (Don’t get me wrong here, there are people that are in this camp that are making a difference. They are also higher burnout candidates. People that will be crashing hard in several years.).  A bit more often you will get the other side of the coin.  It’s the people that tell you they really are having a hard time with their job.  They don’t like it for a myriad of reasons.

The boring “It’s going good” is something I try to avoid.  I’m always taking a side with such a question. Incidentally, it’s probably why my friends think I am a bit TOO opinionated.  Having an opinion is interesting. Being in the middle is easy.

So back to my central point.  If you are in the middle ask yourself “why?”.  What is it about your job that you find incredibly interesting.  What is it you DON’T like.

There is a really easy barometer for this if you have a hard time sorting those two things out. Do you easily forget details about aspects of your job?  Those are probably the things you don’t like.  The things you have to CONSTANTLY remind yourself of.  Write that stuff down and keep a list of it.  Don’t worry you probably already do. You have reminders set up to tell yourself to do it because you won’t naturally want or REMEMBER to.  That will make up your list of things to look for as negatives in your next career move.

This is just some quick and simple personal career and goal planning advice that I try to follow. It can really help immensely, because making career decisions is incredibly hard on either side of the “How is your job going?” question.  Being armed with REAL QUALITATIVE information will be fruitful.