I ran into an interesting post by Anne Zelenka a couple of weeks ago. Anne writes for several websites and I really like what she produces. She is probably a candidate for the Blogs I like side bar. So back to my point, or really Anne's point. On December 28th, 2007 she wrote a post called Try Searching instead of Planning for Career Success. I found this post very understated in its importance.

There are many jobs that have a very defined path to take to achieve the position you desire. But there are exponentially more jobs without a sequenced path.

I only differ from Anne in one respect, I wouldn't call it searching for career success with several trials and errors. I would look at it like a detective. I would examine each job as one of many crime scenes. The more clues the closer you are to solving the career mystery.