With the big holiday season coming up next week, the "career angst" that have possessed me for a month finally abate. Job search is always a challenging if excruciating experience.

Several weeks ago when I decided that I had reached a career crossroads, I did some market research and despairingly found that my skills and 3-year experience at WE were too limited to land me a decent job in the publishing industry.

Available openings for me generally fall into two categories: English web editor at some small start-ups in the technology/consulting industry, and PR positions (e.g. project assistant) in media organizations that require outstanding communication and planning skills. It is clear that the kind of ideal 'decent' jobs that I aspire to would never appear at 51job. Pages of search results are crammed with profit-driven businesses in need of cheap laborers who can work long hours with undying enthusiasm instead of a nerdy copy-editor knowing nothing about finance, marketing or management.

The mere prospect of changing to an obscure position at some obscure co. ltd company was enough to make me squirm. Still I tried and submitted scores of copies of my CV. I worked out some Q&A patterns for the interviews and incredibly passed one of them. But it was a tiring web editing job at an Australia-based consulting agency. What seemed appealingly interesting at first—working with international architectural design firms, as flaunted by the HR girl—turned out to be a daunting task of making endless phone calls and sending emails that few architects would bother to reply.

That may not be a bad start if you are interested in marketing, a promising career for college majors in language. Some of my friends have been questioning the wisdom of my career choice all these years. They advise me to work in a more animating and challenging environment. While I agree that working with people rather than laboring over manuscripts all day long would definitely improve my social skills, I wonder if that change could involve something more fundamental than social adjustment, say, a shift in personality. As we spend one-third of our lifetime working, it is worth a second thought before making a career change.

I know what I want for sure, but I have to give up ideals and sell myself in the market.