Many people in today’s world find themselves going through some type of career transition sometime in their lifetime. Some even go through multiple career transitions. As someone who has coached 1000s of people over the past 10+ years, I’ve seen numerous people embark on a career change to find purpose and meaning in their lives. In this article, I wanted to share a few tips for anyone who does not know where to start the process. There is a lot that goes into a career change so I will revisit this topic again in the future.
In recent years, the number of people changing careers has multiplied due to several factors. Here are some of the things that are driving career change today:
Covid-19: Over 22 million jobs disappeared at the beginning of the global pandemic and disrupted many industries including hospitality, entertainment, travel, and retail (Source: U.S. BLS). This has led to large numbers of people navigating career transitions, sometimes not by choice.
The Great Resignation: Since April 2021, approximately 33 million people left their jobs (Source: U.S. BLS). Recruiters are finding themselves busier than ever, and companies are scrambling to both hire and retain employees. As a result, companies are offering higher salaries, retainer bonuses, and other benefits.
Workplace Burnout: Deloitte published a report from a study related to workplace burnout that showed that 77 percent of 1000 respondents say they have experienced employee burnout at their current full-time job. I wrote about how our personal and work boundaries have become blurred in my post, Addressing Workplace Burnout.
Remote Work Culture: A survey by monster.com showed that 69% of workers experienced burnout symptoms while working from home. Many of us have been working fully remote since the onset of the pandemic and can’t imagine going back to an office full-time. Companies are struggling to bring employees back in or creating effective hybrid work situations.
I wrote about my many career transitions in my last post, Navigating a Career Crisis. I now want to share some tactics that I’ve used during my own career transitions or when helping others. This is a process that I’ve refined over the years through my 1:1 coaching with people or in developing programs for career changers. The first step is to figure out what type of change you want to make.
These are some questions you many want to answer:
How radical of a change do you want to make?
Do you want to change your job function, industry, or both?
What is going well and not going well in your current situation?
What is leading you to not feel fulfilled?
Sometimes, it is simple as a bad manager or the company itself. Other times, it is something more. When it is something beyond just the manager or company, there will be more inner work to do. Changing a job function usually requires learning a new skill or being able to transfer relevant skills to an adjacent type of job function.
Changing your industry involves learning about a new industry. It’s not as difficult to change industries if your skills are in demand. Changing both a job function and industry at the same time can be the most challenging career change to make. It’s not impossible to make this type of change if you have the time and energy to go through the process.
Step 1: Reflect
It can be overwhelming on where to start. The Japanese Ikigai framework can be a helpful tool to follow when thinking about making a career change. I recommend doing some self reflection in a journal or talking to someone like a coach to answer the following questions.
What are you good at? (your skills, strengths, natural abilities)
What do you love? (your interests, passions, curiosities)
What does the world need? (what social, economic, or environmental problems do you want to help solve)
What can you be paid for? (your marketable knowledge, skills, and/or experience that a customer or employer will pay you for)
This article from BetterUp, What is Ikigai and how can it change my life, goes deep into the framework and provides deeper questions for each of the four areas to explore.
I recommend doing this self reflection work when you have no other distractions around you like on a rainy weekend afternoon or early in the morning before you start your day. Don’t plan to do this work all in one day. Reflect over a few weeks (or months) and look for patterns in your responses. You may not have answers to all of these questions and that is okay. Once you know what questions you need to answer, you can then start the research and exploration process.
Step 2: Observe
Pay attention to things you do at work that are not required for your role. When I worked in higher education, I found myself volunteering for various committees focused on helping NYU employees and women. When I was at Flatiron School (under the parent company WeWork), I joined various employee resource groups and an employee experience task-force at both companies. These were all experiences outside of my day to day role that helped me transition into both a new function and a new industry. It helped me explore new functional areas and develop a new set of skills that I was able to highlight in job applications and interviews.
Make note of anytime you found yourself in a “flow state” at work or in your personal life. Flow is that feeling you have when you get deeply immersed in an activity and lose track of time. This concept was coined in 1975 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian American psychologist who wrote the book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Being in a flow state is tied to meaning and purpose. I’ve experienced this mental state when I’ve been involved in any creative process such as art projects, creating learning experiences, or writing articles like this one.
Follow your curiosity. This relates to the “what you love” part of the Ikigai framework. Clues to what might be of interest to you are located right in front of you. Start to make a list of the topic areas that draw your attention. What sections of a bookstore or library do you gravitate towards and what types of books do you pick up to read? What topics do you look up when you browse the web? What article headlines grab your attention? What podcasts or audiobooks do you listen to? What types of YouTube or TikTok videos end up in your feed? Often, your interests can lead to the industry that you target for your next job.
Step 3: Visualize
Use your values to help you imagine your ideal next work situation. Knowing what is most important to you can serve as a filter to evaluate potential new careers. I really love the process that the Zig Zag Project provides to help you get clear on this. It consists of six steps (short podcast episodes) to map out a path that aligns your personal values with your professional ambitions. One of their exercises asks you to set a timer for 15 minutes and write down what your life would be like 5 years from now. Many coaches use this technique with clients by asking them to visualize themselves one or five years from now followed by a series of questions. These questions center around how you want to feel, what your day to day might look like, and what you wish you had more of in your life.
If you feel stuck, you can turn this exercise backwards. Describe what you don’t like about your current work situation, how it makes you feel, and what you wish you could do less of in your day to day. Then, think about the opposite of that as your ideal future career.
Step 4: Explore
Ideate and research new job functions and industries based on your self reflection work. Start brainstorming a list of job functions and industries that appeal to you based on your self reflection work. This is just an initial list to get the process started. You will continue to add to this list as you do further research. Combining a skill with an interest can be one way to go. For example, if you are good at creating content for your social media accounts and obsessed with crypto, you could check out social media related roles at a crypto company.
Creating a chart like this one below can be helpful to identify new career ideas that align with your skills and interests. List a few of your interests across the top of the chart and then list a few of your skills on the left side of the chart. Next, combine them in the boxes to see what ideas come up. Some of your skills and interests may not fit together but others may be an interesting career option to explore.
Once you have an initial list of career ideas to explore, start your research by looking up companies in industries of interest. With a simple Google search, you can find company lists like this one. Start to keep track of all of your research in a spreadsheet. You want to track people, job positions, companies, and industries and write down what you learn about the options you are exploring. LinkedIn has many great search functions to help you with your career exploration and research. I especially like using a Boolean search to narrow down my search results further.
Talking to people in careers you are considering is an important part of this process. One of my early career mistakes was to go into a field of work without talking to a variety of people who were doing the work. It was not until I had finished graduate school and started working in the field as a mental health counselor, that I realized that I might have chosen the wrong career for myself. I would have saved myself a lot of time and money if I had spoken to more people and learned about other options for someone with an undergraduate degree in psychology. In the end, it did all work out because I do fall back on my clinical training at times even though I don’t practice as a therapist anymore.
Step 5: Experiment
As you do your career exploration and research, things will start to connect and get more clear. You will begin to cross out some of the career ideas off your list. You can further narrow down your list by going a bit deeper in your learning through small and low risk experiments. Enrolling in graduate school or a tech bootcamp program is not a low risk experiment. A low risk experiment is taking a 1 day workshop on data analytics or reading a book on business strategy.
I recommend not investing too much time and money in this stage of the process until you are more sure that this might be the right path. These low risk experiments are a way for you to learn if a career option is a right fit or not. It is also a way for you to fill a gap related to knowledge, skills, or experience that can be helpful once you actually start a job search. You need to have all three of these in a new field to make the transition easier.
You can gain new “knowledge” easily these days thanks to the internet. I’ve read books, joined professional networking groups, subscribed to newsletters/blogs, listened to podcasts, and followed thought leaders on social media to help increase my knowledge of new careers. Talking to people in the careers that you are exploring is also a great way to gain knowledge about what the day to day work looks like, what skills are needed, and how to make a transition into that type of career. I’ve then used my own personal network on LinkedIn to find people to speak to about their work. This is the best way to learn insider information such as niche publications to follow or networks to join.
There are so many options out there to learn “skills”. Now days, you don’t need to go back to school to learn a new career skill. I’ve dabbled in online programs and courses on LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and other places on the internet. For example, I tested a UX design course from Google via Coursera last year and was quite impressed by the structure of the program and the fact that it helped students complete a UX design portfolio in a few months that could be used during a job search.
Learning a new skill won’t help in a career transition unless you have a chance to practice it and gain “experience”. That might mean creating a work portfolio or volunteering your services for a local small business or a non-profit via Catchafire, a platform that matches skilled individuals with work projects. For example, if you are looking to enter the marketing field, I would recommend taking a few courses on Hubspot or Coursera and then asking a friend with a small business or a local business in your neighborhood if you can help them with their online marketing. This all counts as “experience” that can be listed on a resume. Employers are not likely to take risks on a career changer unless they see some evidence of their skills.
Some Final Words
There are a lot of nuances when it comes to making a career change. I don’t recommend doing it alone. Use your network and/or a coach to help you along the way. There is a lot more I can say about this subject but since this post is already quite long, I’ll revisit this topic again at some point.
In the meantime, I wanted to share some personal news. I recently made a change myself. I joined a team to help develop coaches at BetterUp, a global coaching platform with a mission to help people everywhere live with greater clarity, purpose, and passion. I could not have found a better company that was more aligned with my own personal mission in life. I am very excited about this next step in my career and the learning that this will bring that I will share with all my readers!
Career Transition Resources
Books:
Designing Your Life (Bill Burnett & Dave Evans)
Activate Your Agile Career (Marti Konstant)
Life is in the Transitions (Bruce Feiler)
Choose Possibility (Sukhinder Singh Cassidy)
Future Proofed (Natalia Peart)
Articles & Podcasts:
HBR Article, How to Figure Out What You Want Next in Your Career
BetterUp Article: What is ikigai and how can it change my life?
The Perils of Following Your Career Passion, WorkLife with Adam Grant Podcast
The Zig Zag Project 6 series podcast
Additional Resources:
BetterUp’s mission is to help people everywhere live with greater clarity, purpose, and passion. They provide all kinds of coaching (including career coaching) both to business and direct to consumers.
RISE, by The Mom Project is a scholarship program committed to accelerating equity for moms and women of color by providing access to upskill tech certifications, while harnessing the power of community, support, and job placement—in six months or less, and at no cost to participants!
On Deck helps people start companies, find their next role, and invest in their careers. I used to work at On Deck’s First 50 program and personally witnessed 100s of people transition into a new role at a startup over the past year. Many of the people were coming from outside of the startup industry and finding exciting jobs at startups that were mission driven.
These are just a few of the many programs out there that can be helpful when making a career transition. I also know a lot of great career coaches, so feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn for any specific recommendations.