In some cases, they don’t want to change career, they simply have no choice. Mergers & acquisitions, downsizing, re-engineering, cost-cutting, restructuring. Any of these can result in you being made redundant. And if your sector is doing badly, or if your skills are out of date, or if you are perceived as being too expensive by a potential employer; you may have no choice and just have to move into a new arena.
	Second – some people want to jump into a new line of work because they HATE the work they are doing now. It is fair to say that most people are unclear about what direction they should take as teenagers, so when it comes to making career decisions, they tend to be based on scholastic aptitude, or perceived opportunities (for example, a few years back, lots of parents thought the IT sector would be a ‘safe’ job for their offspring). Family and peer pressure comes into it as well – if there’s a family history in a certain sector, there can be an automatic expectation that you will ‘go into the biz’ – retail, law, dentistry, the rag trade, whatever.
	The third most common reason for making a career transition is what we call ‘Topping Out’. You like your current work, but the next step up is either not available to you or it involves things that you just hate – the latter one is a particular problem for people who like to roll their sleeves up and don’t want the hassle and people problems associated with being in a management function. Operators do stuff, managers manage; and for some people, that is a very unattractive prospect and they start thinking about moving out …

Q: What are the benefits of making a career change?
A: In a nutshell, happiness. Just imagine getting out of bed on a Monday morning actively looking forward to going to work. Very few people feel this way. A lot of us get stuck into a routine, a rut, because we are locked in the golden handcuffs – we have kids and mortgages and repayments and bills to pay every month. We don’t particularly enjoy the day-job, but what the heck – it pays the bills. But it is possible to find a balance between your working life and your private life, even in these difficult times. And if you get that balance right, the benefits are self-evident.

A less obvious benefit to making a change is that you will probably invest a great deal of time and thought into it. And this is something that most people do not do – we all drift along with the current, most of us never really questioning who we are, where we are, and how we got there. In these very uncertain times, it is a massive advantage to have thought these things through. It puts you in a more commanding position in your workplace and working to a plan is always going to be better than firefighting. We call this ‘career management’ and it is something quite different to merely job-hunting.

Q: What are the pitfalls?
A: The major pitfall is making a bad move. Either (a) to a sector that you don’t know enough about and you discover that it isn’t all it is cracked up to be or (b) to an organisation that you don’t know enough about and you discover that the corporate culture is dreadful or that your immediate boss is a psychopath with a Napoleonic complex …

Both of those pitfalls centre on inadequate preparation. If you are an accountant now, and you have decided to make a career change, you need to do deeeeeep research on your proposed sector or company – not just the stuff you can find out on their website or in their annual report. You need to read widely around the sector, the organisation, its competitors, customers, suppliers and the pressures and constraints it is under. Then you need to talk to people in the game and at all levels in the sector or company. THEN you are in a position to start making a decision!

Q: If someone has a well paid senior position, will they have to start at the beginning again/will they have to take paycuts?
A: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Obviously, if you are talking about going back to college for 2-3 years of post-grad coursework, you are probably going to take a dip in lifestyle while you undertake that further education. In defining your plan for your career, you will have to cost out whether you can afford to do that in the first place and you will further have to cost out whether your desired shift is viable in the long term.

There are three overlapping circles to being happy in your work – the circle of enjoyment (doing work that you like), the circle of skill (doing work that you are good at), and the circle of adequate financial reward (work, after all, is a four-letter word). If those three circles closely overlap, you will be a happy, fulfilled, productive person. If one of those circles is way out of kilter, you can’t be happy. You just can’t. So, if you are having to take a huge dip in take-home pay in order to move career, I would say there’s very little point – you are just replacing the stress of a career you don’t like with the stress of bills that you can’t pay.

Q: How do prospective employers look at CVs belonging to people who are making a break?
A: There’s a wide spectrum of opinion on this. It depends on how the individual is portraying the move on the CV – and very few people do this well. It also depends on how disposed the employer is to this kind of thing and whether they have had positive or negative experience with career-changers in the past. There’s a lot of lip-service paid to the concept of thinking outside the box, but the fact of the matter is that employers are, for the most part, a very conservative bunch, and they are therefore averse to taking any sort of risk. So if they perceive you as being a high-risk hire, you are dead in the water before you begin.

You also need to consider things even further from the employer’s perspective. Not only are they disinclined to take a risk – they don’t have to! If I am an employer and I advertise in the national press for a Marketing person for my snack foods division, I am going to get say, 100, CVs in the post, and 96 of those are going to be from experienced, qualified marketeers, and most of them will already be working in the snack food sector. Typically these will be people making a sideways or slightly upward move.

So why-oh-why (if I was that employer) would I want to meet someone who until yesterday was an accountant? Someone whose CV has accountancy responsibilities and accomplishments all over it? If I am that employer, unless you do a really good job of telling me otherwise, I am going to perceive hiring you as being a needless risk. Possibly a waste of time. I need someone who can hit the ground running and make an immediate difference in my business. So, if you are making a change in your career, you need to recognise that, you need to respect that and you need to tell me from the get-go that you are pretty damn special, otherwise, I am going to bin your CV.

Q: Do people have illusions of fulfilling a lifetime ambition and then finding that the grass is not always greener?
A: They shouldn’t but they do. Think about it for a moment – your choice of career is one of the few really free choices you have in this world and the difference between a good choice and a bad one is massive. I have met people who put more effort and thought into choosing a home stereo than they have into planning a career move! Unless you are born in very fortunate circumstances, your career is going to be your sole source of income – so any changes you make in that career should be regarded as an investment. If you are making moves on the basis of little or no planning and research, don’t expect to come up smiling.

We all know that the market is tough out there now; I would point to two factors that most people don’t consider:

Q: People have a lot of financial commitments like mortgages and families - what happens if it all goes wrong?
A: We’re back to first principles here again – if you are actively managing your career, a bad move will not be a disaster for you or your family. If you are managing your network, staying abreast of the shifts and moves in your sector (and this can mean staying on top of what has been going on in your old sector) and above all, not burning bridges as you go, then a bad move is just that, an unfortunate mistake. This can be a disaster for some people, but in my experience, those are the people who have a combination of both inadequate planning and lousy luck.

It’s the same as anything else in this life, if you are going to do something unfamiliar, it’s a good idea to consult an expert – you take your car to a garage for repairs, you take your cat to the vet if it’s sick, you take your tax affairs to an accountant. If you are considering getting out of your current career path, working with outside help on making your move is going to have obvious benefits. You could try operating on your cat on the kitchen table, but I wouldn’t recommend it …

 

Rowan Manahan is author of the forthcoming book Where's My Oasis? and Managing Director of Fortify Services.

Original article here