With experience moving through many different sectors of the job market and getting a late start on his current career choice, Career Counsellor Paul Bowman can empathize when students come to him unsure about their career path.
Bowman, Sci ’86, has followed an unconventional career path since graduating from Queen’s. He has worked in fields ranging from engineering to adult education.
Bowman started last year as one of four career counsellors working at Queen’s Career Services.
After graduating from Queen’s, Bowman worked in engineering for five years as a research assistant at the Royal Military College and then at Nortel’s manufacturing facility in Calgary. He decided to switch directions and returned to Queen’s to get an education certificate.
Bowman said it was a personality test at Nortel that ultimately convinced him he was in the wrong career stream.
“There’s a personality assessment called the Meyers-Briggs,” he said. “Based on your results, you’re assigned to one of 16 personality types, and then those personality types are correlated, not so much with specific careers but with different general areas of work where people with that personality tend to be successful. … There were about 40 of us working in our department, and we did it as a department.
“Based on our results, we had to split ourselves up and go to different parts of the room. I found that 35 of the 40 people were congregated together in one group, and then there were five of us kind of spread around the room. I was in the complete opposite corner as most of my co-workers, and I thought, ‘Hmm, maybe this is telling me something.’”
Bowman wasn’t overly enthusiastic about his work even before he took the personality test, he said.
“There were certain parts of the work that I liked, but for the most part I wasn’t particularly ionate about it.” Bowman said there had been indications he wasn’t suited for engineering going all the way back to his reasons for choosing the program.
“It’s something I did because in high school, I had done really well in math and science, and at that time, I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “Basically, through the encouragement of high school teachers, I went into engineering.”
Bowman said the engineering program was difficult for him.
“I struggled to get through; it was tough slogging,” he said. “I probably should have switched out after first year, but I stayed with it. [There was] a lot of peer pressure, a lot of family pressure. I come from a small town and had been very successful in school, and I guess I didn’t want to be seen as a failure.”
After going back to Queen’s for his education certificate, Bowman worked in adult education at Loyola Community Learning Centre in Kingston for seven years, looked after a friend’s farm for a few years, and then came back to Queen’s to work as the Theological College’s continuing education co-ordinator. After four years in that job, he switched directions again, becoming a career counsellor last year.
Bowman said each job has presented its own set of challenges and opportunities.
“They’ve been very different,” he said. “The work at RMC and the work with Nortel was technically related work—I spent a lot of time on the computer analyzing data or, at Nortel, doing some programming—whereas the adult education and the work I’m currently doing, there’s a lot of one-on-one work with people, a lot of listening and a lot of helping people deal with their various life issues.”
Bowman said his current job is aimed at trying to get other people onto a career path that fits them.
“What we do is we try to help people find a focus, which is not necessarily a specific career, but the general sorts of things that someone is looking for in their work life that basically gives them meaning and satisfaction,” he said.
Bowman said his wide range of experience helps him relate to the various students who come to him.
“I think because of the different things I’ve done, the things I’ve studied, I can connect with students from different backgrounds, faculties and courses of study,” he said.
Bowman encourages all students, regardless of their stage in life, to make use of career counselling.
“We see everyone from first-year students to Ph.D students,” he said. “Very often we hear from students who are towards the end of their fourth year who say, ‘I wish I would have known about you and made use of your services sooner.’”
Bowman said he encourages people to keep an open mind to different career experiences.
“Your degree is only a small part of who you are,” he said. “Don’t define yourself too narrowly by your degree: think about all the different things you enjoy doing, think about all the different skills you’ve acquired, and look for ways to match your skills and interests to the work that’s out there.”
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