I left BlackRock after reaching VP in 7 years

I knew I was interested in art, but I grew up thinking that doing something related to creative work wouldn’t make me any money.

As graduation approached, I applied for roles at nearly every financial institution, from investment banking to asset management. I also just accepted the first offer that was extended to me.

This was BlackRock.

Struggling with self-doubt and wanting to leave in my first six months

Things were very hard when I started. The truth was that I chose BlackRock because of its brand name and I didn’t evaluate whether it was the right job for me.

I ended up in a position that required coding and had no idea how to code. As part of my job, I had to query data in SQL and perform risk analysis for mortgage backed securities.

The job didn’t seem right to me. I didn’t have an engineering or computer science degree. I was one of the few liberal arts employees.

That had a massive impact on my confidence. I was less than six months into this role and I was struggling daily. But I chose to persevere and stay on.

Part of that was because I liked the company culture and the people I got to work with. Part of it was because I still believed that work wasn’t supposed to be fun anyway.

Besides, the money was very good.

And things got better. After two years, I switched fields and took on a sales-oriented role that was a better fit for me.

It wasn’t long before the nagging feelings of not fitting in.

I remembered meeting friends who weren’t in the industry. They were like, “Oh, Jennifer, you’re always complaining about your job. Why don’t you quit?”

I knew I wanted to do something else, but fear held me back. I didn’t know what I wanted to do if I left BlackRock, and I also thought that quitting would make me look like a failure.

I spent seven years at BlackRock and was promoted to Vice President. I think I left the job more experienced and with a solid network.

Leaving BlackRock for the startup world

I took an 80% pay cut when I left my job at BlackRock to join Style Theory, a fashion rental company.

When I got the offer, I was like, “Wow, can I live on this little money?”

The office was certainly not as glamorous as those in the central business district, as it was located in an industrial building.

When I went on business trips for BlackRock, I was put up in nice five-star hotels. But at Style Theory, I found myself staying in cheap hotels. The two companies were between worlds.

That said, I still treasured my time at Theory of Style. I had the idea of ​​starting my own fashion rental company for travelers, but I had no idea what it was like to start and run a business.

Style theory became my business school. Instead of spending several hundred thousand dollars on an MBA, I thought I could learn the ins and outs of building a startup.

One thing that Style Theory gave me was the huge amount of autonomy I had as an employee.

I didn’t get to lead many projects at BlackRock, even though I had spent seven years there. There were far too many people who were older than me.

Make another pivot in career coaching

I left Theory of Style after three years. I still wanted to be an entrepreneur and felt that I had gained the skills I needed from my time there.

After leaving Style Theory, I moved to Singapore just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The strict isolation measures made it difficult for me to meet new people.

I ended up starting a podcast about career pivots. This topic resonated deeply with me as I had been struggling to figure out what a “perfect for me” career looks like while facing the fear of leaving a “perfect on paper” job behind.

As my podcast started to catch on, I started getting messages from people looking for help building their careers. Some even asked if they could pay me for my time.

Soon my client list began to grow and I became the founder of my own career coaching firm, Ctrl Alt Career.

Looking back, I don’t regret starting at BlackRock. I got a lot of good training and met a lot of interesting people. My time at BlackRock shaped me into the person I am today.

If there’s one thing I could change, it would be to spend more time in my younger years discovering my interests instead of just going after the low-hanging fruit of whatever company was recruiting on campus.

That would have saved me the heartache and pain I experienced for the first seven years of my career.

I probably would have been happier if I had allowed myself to dream more, instead of weighing opportunities if they were practical or profitable.