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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are out of date, or if you are perceived as being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. |
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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. |
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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:
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The
majority of us are going to have to make moves at
some point in our careers. Yes, HAVE TO! Downsizing,
cost-cutting, mergers & acquisitions, re-engineering,
restructuring, hostile takeovers, etc.. In the US,
the figure for enforced job moves is 7. So, seven
times between leaving education and retiring, you
will have to move job. If you are making
ill-considered moves in a market as fractious as
that, you are inviting a lot of needless stress
into your life. |
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When
I work with employers - hiring staff - I rarely,
rarely, rarely see polished, professional candidates.
For the most part, the people who present themselves
are pretty average. I don’t mean that they
are no good at the job - that’s the problem,
they are. But so are all the competition. Similarly
qualified, similarly experienced, similarly trained,
similar mindset … So the challenge when
you are job-hunting is to stand out from the crowd.
Very few people do this well at interview and
when I meet them, I lunge across the table and
grab them with both hands.
Consider
this – every time you apply for a job, you
are up against a workforce of highly experienced,
highly qualified candidates. And very occasionally,
you are up against an absolute whizz-kid. Not
necessarily whizzy on the job, but whizzy at job-hunting,
whizzy at interviews. You need to take the time
to learn the new skills of career management,
because your competition is and they may get ahead
of you – even if you are the better candidate.
Career
management – networking, research, planning
your moves – these all used to be a big
deal, only practised by people going for very
senior posts. Now, and at all levels, they are
basic survival skills. |
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 …
“Sure,
I could get up at dawn and drive an hour in
traffic to a job I hate, that does not inspire
me creatively whatosever. Or, I could wake up
at noon and learn how to play the sitar.”
Bill
Hicks
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Rowan
Manahan is author of the forthcoming book
Where's My Oasis? and Managing Director of Fortify
Services.
Original article here
