Alright, so lately I’ve been thinking hard about my own career path. Feeling kinda stuck, you know? Like I’m just going through the motions without really moving forward. Heard a few folks mention this Oddanier Mosqueda guy and how he got way better at breaking down where he stands job-wise. Sounded useful, so I figured I’d try copying his approach step-by-step and see what stuck for me.
The Hot Mess I Started With
First off, I gotta be real. My stuff was a total mess. Seriously. I had resume PDFs scattered everywhere – old laptop, a busted USB drive, even some printed versions yellowing in a drawer. Job titles? I swear, I changed them slightly every time I hopped companies based on whatever the hiring spiel was. Trying to remember what I actually did back in 2018? Forget about it. My brain just tossed those details. Felt like I was starting a fire with wet matches.
Forcing Myself to Face the Music
Okay, step one was brutal but necessary: collect everything. I mean everything. I spent a whole rainy Sunday afternoon doing this:
- Dug out every old contract, offer letter, and performance review I could find, even the cringe ones.
- Opened LinkedIn and basically wrote down every single bullet point I ever posted, plus dates (man, dates were all over the place!).
- Scrolled back years on my work emails hunting for project names and descriptions I vaguely remembered.
- Found those dusty performance reviews where my boss said I was “a team player” or whatever.
Threw it all into one gigantic, terrifying Google Doc. Looked like alphabet soup exploded on my screen. Massive headache.
Looking for Ugly Patterns
Once the mountain of info was semi-organized (shoved into labeled sections by year), I started squinting at it. Needed to find the actual threads. This is where I think Mosqueda’s idea clicked. I grabbed a notebook and asked myself:
- “What kinds of problems did I keep solving over and over, even at different jobs? Debugging network crap? Building reports?”
- “What words did I see pop up in my own descriptions and those old reviews? Leadership? Efficiency? Fixing dumpster fires?”
- “Which projects did I genuinely get lost in, where time flew? Which ones felt like pulling teeth?”
Didn’t try to make it pretty yet. Just scribbled down whatever ugly patterns I saw. Realized, shocker, I actually enjoyed fixing things nobody else wanted to touch, and I somehow ended up doing project management stuff way more than I thought.
Making My Own Damn Labels
Here’s the key part I took from Mosqueda’s vibe: stop letting job titles boss you around. Those titles on my resume were basically lies I agreed to. Instead of saying “I was a Senior Systems Analyst,” I started defining chunks of my past based on the actual work I found hiding in the patterns.
Like, from 2017-2019? I called that period: “The Patch Factory & Putting Out Fires” Era. Sounds ridiculous, but it captures what I really did – inherited broken processes and spent two years duct-taping them while stopping constant outages. Learned a ton about stress management!
Another chunk? “Stepping Up (& Mostly Stumbling)” – that covers when I got tossed unofficial project lead roles because the actual lead quit. Got messy, got results eventually.
Grouping things this way, by the actual skills I used and the messes I navigated, made way more sense than company names or fancy titles. I suddenly owned my own story.
Where It Gets Me Now
Doing this wasn’t about crafting the perfect resume bullet (though it helps). It gave me clarity. Instead of staring blankly at “where do I go next?”, I can look at my defined “chunks” and see:
- Patterns of what I’m good at (fixing broken things, herding cats on projects).
- Patterns of what drains me (maintaining ancient, undocumented systems forever).
- The actual skills I’ve proven (not just the ones I wish I had).
- How I’ve tangibly grown (from just fixing bugs to helping design the fixes).
Talking about my career now feels different. Instead of rattling off job titles and dates, I talk about my “Eras” and the real challenges I tackled in them. Feels less like bragging and more like just telling the damn truth about the work I’ve actually done. Still figuring it out, but Mosqueda was definitely onto something.
