Weddingbee boards

I am lucky enough to be a young person employed at a really good company by a really wonderful boss who is pushing me to succeed every day and in my life. I'm at an odd place in the company- an entry level position that is in the marketing department, but works with engineering a whole bunch- and I'm trying to determine if my future lies in the Marketing department as a Product Manager or in Research and Development as a Project Manager, or maybe even in Operational Excellence.

I don't want anyone making my decision for me...but I would love to hear stories if you have any about how you came into your career or if you had to make a job move and how you came to the decision. I'm pretty torn because I love both Marketing and Engineering, but they are both so different and I can only choose one path.

Whether or not these are your areas of experience, please share your stories- I want to hear them and about how you decided and moved on up (or laterally!) in the world!

Whoops, this thread got buried...yeah it's a really weird situation, I have both the marketing department (product managers) and the engineering department (project managers) trying to recruit me!

OpEx people at my company (and I assume at a lot of large corps like mine) sort of act like consultants. You specialize in Operations, so yes, it's a lot of like supply chain mgt type stuff but you look for problem areas where the supply chain is getting held up or bogged down and try to come up with and implement processes to make everything run more smoothly and effectively. They take requests for projects and within that organization you go into a department you may or may not be familiar with and try to find ways to essentially expedite things.

Having so many drastically different options open and available to me has really made me think and do some soul-searching. I feel like in order to determine which path I want to take, I need to figure out where my interests truly lie because I'm type of person who would want to explore everything for a while before making up my mind.

I went and talked with my mom about it, and was telling her I just didn't know how I feel about Engineering because one of my contacts over there was telling me how in order to think like an engineer, you really have to have a strong desire to take things apart and see how they work, and I don't really have that type of natural curiosity (I say if it's not broke, don't fix it!!!) But she started nodding enthusiastically, and said "yes, when you were very young, you always were so interested in watching your father put things together. You always wanted a set of directions for everything so you could learn how all the pieces go together."

That's kind of the point at which a light bulb went off in my head and I realized I'd be great in engineering! I'm still going to sleep on it, but I think that's where I'm headed!!

what is your educational background?

I'm currently an engineer, but I've considered a future in marketing. I actually know a lot of people who started in R&D and then later switched to marketing, so the path is definitely there. I don't know anyone who started in marketing and then went to engineering, so I'd say start with engineering to keep your options open.