In this episode my guest is Arun Mahajan, who is a career mentor for and the founder of Careers Development Group.
We talked about how he made his career change from being a finance professional to a career mentor, what he has learned in this journey and what he suggests to people who want to make international career changes and especially start a career in Germany.
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What I took away from our conversation
Arun was a successful finance professional who worked in big brands and startups in India, Singapore and Germany.
Coming from a humble middle class family he learned the importance of money and he educated himself about personal finances. He knew lots of people struggled with the topic and wanted to help people by sharing his knowledge.
He knew writing was powerful because his brother was a great writer and touched him with what he wrote. But he knew that he could not write out of the blue. Instead he would be more effective when somebody asked him questions. So he started writing answers to the questions on a website that is made for information sharing through Q+A called Quora. He soon realised most of the questions were coming not from the personal finance topic but about how to establish a career in Germany.
He answered these questions, interacted with people, listened to their challenges and realised that people needed his support in this topic and he was enjoying to provide this support so he changed his focus to career mentoring and founded Careers Development Group (CDG). He now runs a Facebook group with 1.7K members and hosts regular events with full attendance.
We mostly have the image in our minds that what your next job should be first clear in your mind and then you go and make it happen. The reality is, there might be another thing that you’ve never thought of that could be way better. And you can only do it when you take an imperfect action and see the reaction in you and outside of you. (That’s what I talk about in the Career Change Fundamentals masterclass too). This was exactly how Arun experienced it. His starting point was wanting do serve people. And it is still the guiding force in everything he does.
He organises free events with the community. He looks for different business models that serves his audience the best way. And he appears in the podcasts like mine as a guest to share his knowledge.
When I asked him about his suggestions to anyone who wanted to create unique careers he said it was important to be flexible because everything changes (we can all understand why living in the corona times), that we should own our careers and not delegate the responsibility to “experts” and we build connections because connections are one of our greatest assets for personal, career and business growth.
Take it Forward
If you enjoyed this conversation you can take it forward.
If you’d like to learn more about Arun, you can visit his Quora page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
If you’d like to join the conversation in the Unique Careers, Unique Lives community you can do so here.
