At some point in the last 10 or 15 years, I realized that I was not interested in moving up. Maybe sideways or parallel, but definitely not into management. Been there; done that. I had no interest. I was a manager before I took my current job, and when I decided to leave and move back to the East Coast, I purposely didn’t look for a management job. I started by looking for jobs that I thought would feed my passion for helping people. I wasn’t really sure what “helping people” meant at the time, but I knew that I wanted to be in government, and I wanted to do something that made a difference.

It all started when I had to prepare for my employee performance evaluation a few years ago. My supervisor and I had just closed out the previous year, and I was preparing for the next year. I started thinking about where I was in my career and what came next. I knew that “helping people” didn’t describe all that I was doing. I made myself sit down and think about what I was doing to “pay the bills” versus the other things that were “lighting me up” — the work that I was passionate about.

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