When your only tool is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails

...Or so I'm told. But what does that mean, exactly? Right now, it feels a lot like my job hunt.

I had the opportunity to meet a renowned Marketing writer/blogger last week, grabbing the chance to meet him while he was in London for a couple of days. Unfortunately, however much I think he and his blog are awesome, I can't link to it in this post as if he followed the traffic back here I don't think he'd dig my tales of girls and boys and marsupials, nor the old Serial Killer Sunday posts.

Anyway, I'd filled him in on where I am professionally -- some good experience but now "between jobs" and asked for his advice on how better to market myself, and get that awesome job with it. As part of my ongoing personal development, I have also set some objectives for myself -- working towards them involves in part asking people I admire how they got to be where they are.

It seems that there are two ways I can approach looking for work. The marketer summarised my position quite well, when you're out of work for a while you start casting your net wider and applying for jobs you could do, and maybe even do well, but aren't necessarily what you really want. There is nothing wrong with this, of course. The other approach is to hold out for what you really want, and accept no compromise. He suggested volunteering to work without pay for somewhere awesome, so long as I would be doing real work and not stuffing envelopes.

He has also stressed that I should be writing -- by way of submitting guest posts to relevant blogs, or writing a blog of my own. I tried setting up a new blog the other day just for writings on the PR/marketing industry, but I fell at the first hurdle -- I couldn't come up with a good name for it that wasn't already taken.

This week I have two interviews coming up: a second interview for a job as a sales and marketing exec, that seems to have little marketing to it that isn't actually sales, and a communications role that would be a significant promotion from where I was before. I was informally interviewed on the phone the other day for another sales position -- although it was described as management trainee or something, I think that was just clever marketing on the part of the job ad. It seemed to go well, I was told some of my answers were good, and that I'd here more if I was to be invited for the two-day selection process this week. I didn't hear anything more.

The trouble is, sometimes it seems like applying for jobs that aren't what I really want but I could probably do is treating all problems as nails. Do I actually want to work in sales? Would I be any good at it? And come to that, when did what I do for a living become so damned all-important anyway? It does not define me as a person, and should not be what my life is about. But it's easy to say that when you actually have a job -- getting one first is key, the rest comes afterwards.

A couple of my friends have turned to teaching. One of them has had several other careers to date, including being a police officer, a lorry driver, a petrol station attendant and a media sales executive. Will teaching finally be what they are looking for? The other friend has been treading water for the last few years, not really knowing what they wanted. I can more readily see them staying in teaching. They have suggested it to me as a career path, too, but I'd only take them seriously if they had already been doing it for several years -- but like social work which has also been suggested, I really don't see it being for me.

Finally, a friend posted this video on my Facebook the other day. It made me laugh, but I'm not sure what they were trying to tell me...