CAREER CHANGES 101

Q102: If you're not in the mood for retirement just yet, but you want to know if your job is really the job you want for life. Do you fancy a complete career overhaul and if so, how can you make that transition more smooth? Just to tell us how is Rowan Manahan, and he's the MD of Fortify Services, good morning Rowan.

Fortify: Good morning Venetia.

Q102: Now, making a career change is a very, very big step, how do you advise people to do it first and foremost?
Fortify: First and foremost, you need to ask yourself “Why do I want to make this change?” Am I genuinely unhappy, demotivated and perhaps even at risk by continuing in this career, or am I just feeling a bit sorry for myself today? Career transition – moving from one recognisable, defined career path to another – is frequently not easy. The steps involved are not complicated, in many instances they are nothing more than common sense, but you need to be ready to put in a lot of work to make them happy steps.

Accordingly, my first piece of advice to anyone considering a transition, is to ask yourself some big questions. How have you arrived at this point in your career? What has been the straw that broke the camel’s back – is it a big shift in the business, or is it an accumulation of niggly things that are just telling you that you are not happy where you are and that you should move on? Once you have that question answered, you can start to take concrete steps towards making a move.

Q102: OK, do you think that people put themselves under pressure (completely by themselves!) that they should stay more than X number of years in one job or that they have to be somewhere by a milestone age of say 30 or 40? Do you think there is all that self-imposed pressure in people wanting to change careers?
Fortify: There are a variety of reasons why people would think about moving on. Three of the biggest ones would be:

1. Number one, they don’t want to change career at all, they simply have no choice. There's mergers & acquisitions, re-engineering, cost-cutting, restructuring and so forth and any of these can result in you being made redundant. And if your sector is doing badly, if your skills are out of date, or if you are perceived as being too expensive by a potential employer; you may have no choice and just have to move into a new arena.

2. Second, some people want to jump into a new line of work because they HATE the work they're 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, college choices and so on, those 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 can come into this as well – if there’s a family history in a certain sector, there can be an automatic expectation that you will go into the business – retail, law, dentistry, the rag trade, whatever.

3. The third most common reason we see 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. You know - operators do stuff, managers manage; and for some people, that's a very unattractive prospect and they start thinking about moving out …

Q102: Do you think there might be an element of insecurity there - say you're given a promotion that you mighn't be actually capable of doing the job?
Fortify: That's known as the 'Peter Principle' - coined back in the 1970s by Dr. Lawrence Peter. He said that at some point in their careers, most people will be promoted beyond their level of competence. Scott Adams, the guy who writes the Dilbert cartoon has coined the obverse of that - he calls it the 'Dilbert Prinicple' and his contention is that the safest place for incompetent people is in management - they can do less harm up there.

Q102: (laughing) Getting back to the whole education element of this - after your Junior Certificate or O-Levels, you have certain options and 16 is very young to be making subject choices that are going to impact on what you are going to be doing when you are 28? You choose your subjects, you do your final exams in secondary school and then you get a third level place depending on what subjects you have or what subjects you have done well in. Do you think that our subject choice is too limiting for our third level choices and our subsequent career choices?
Fortify: Not particularly. The school issue is not really a huge issue, because unless you happen to be in a school that offers all, I think it is 28, subjects in any combination that you choose - and there are only 3 or 4 schools around the country which offer that broad a combination. For the most parts, students are doing the standard (mandatory) subjects - you'll have to do Irish, English and Maths; you should, and most people do, take a modern language, you should, and most people do, take a science subject (and Geography would be considered a science for the purposes of securing a College place). So, with those 5 subjects accounted for, there isn't really much scope for choice left for the remaining 2-3 subjects.

It's when you are filling in the forms for College choices where the problems can arise. Let's say a student has a massive ability to generate high scores in 3-hour exams - someone who is really good at regurgitating information.There's a perception, whether it is down to snob-value or what; I don't know how it has come about, but there is a perception that if a student is capable of generating 599 points out of a possible 600 in the Leaving Certificate, that student should go for a high-points course in College.

Q102: That's ridiculous!
Fortify: Dr. Murphy, from University College Dublin, the man who invented the modern points system, said it was one of his greatest regrets! Looking back, the geniuses, the brightest of the bright, used to study Classics, Philosophy, Logic, English Literature or Ancient Civilisations. Now the students who are capable of generating these massive points, by a factor of competition, are going into the high-points College programmes - Medicine, Veterinary, Physiotherapy, Actuarial Studies - and they may not be in any way suited to a career in these professions.

Typically here at Fortify, we are not dealing with 16, 18 or even 20 year-olds; we deal with people coming out of the University system and the majority of our clients are aged 30 or above - and these are people who have discovered "Hey, I'm not too happy where I am in life right now. It's a great shame I did an engineering degree and did 9 years' of engineering, because really, it does nothing for me and I hate it!"

Q102: I had someone who got high points in my school and went on to study Veterinary Medicine, but later discovered that she was allergic to animals!
Fortify: Exactly! She didn't want to 'waste the points' - as though they had any transactional value - and went into a programme that she was not just unsuited for, but physically incapable of completing.

There was a study done a few years back in the US, which was an interesting one Venetia. They looked at 800 19 year olds, coming out of 12th Grade in the American system and all of the participants had a pre-defined career preference - "I want to be a brain surgeon, rocket scientist, attorney, engineer" All of them were given the opportunity to shadow someone who was in that profession for one working week. And at the end of one week of seeing the reality of life in that job or career, after just one week, 61% of the students changed their minds. Almost two-thirds! I meet people who say they want to go into Law as a career, because they read John Grisham novels and enjoy The Practice or Ally McBeal on television. Or people who think that Medicine is going to be like what it's like on ER or Scrubs.

Q102: That's a very good point. Do you think that TV programmes influence down to that level - down to the level of career choices?
Fortify: Of course! They must! There is no way that advertisers would spend the trillions of dollars that they do, trying to persuade us to buy all of the household-name products that we all purchase every day, if they were not getting a return on that investment. Why would we only be influenced in that way in the 30-second bursts in between the programmes? We are monstrously influenced by the programmes that we watch and we generate perceptions on that basis.

Again, studies done on this in the States on people who were regular watchers of daytime soaps - they had a belief that 80% of people who suffer a cardiac arrest in a hospital environment will be revived because 'Dr Drake Remoray' hits them on the chest a few times and authoritatively shouts "Clear" and zaps them with the paddles and they wake up going "Ooh Dr Remoray, you are so wonderful." The real figure for revival is something in the order of 10% These soapwatchers had a perception that the rate of abortion, the rate of murder, the rate of kidnapping, the rate of substance abuse, the rate of divorce was something like 3-5 times what the actual rates are.

Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine addressed this last year - people have a perception based on what they see on the news. Violent crime, bank robberies, burglaries - despite the fact that the incidence of those crimes have diminished over time, the level of the reporting of those crimes on the nightly news has increased, so people have a perception that is is massively unsafe out there. Statistically, it's perfectly safe out there! You are more likely to be hit by a truck than to be the victim of a gun attack in the US.

Q: What are the main pitfalls, apart from economic worry, about making a career change?
Fortify: There are a lot of potential pitfalls, the major one is making a bad move. Either 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 (i.e. it isn't as much fun here as it is on ER). Or you make a move 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, and those are the most common, both of those 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. Anyone can do that. You need to read widely around the sector, the organisation, its competitors, customers, suppliers and the pressures, constraints and regulations that it operates under. And that's only the first stage. THEN you need to talk to people in the game and at all levels in the sector or company. Now, you are in a position to start thinking about making a decision, because now - you are informed.

Q102: What about people who want to take a sabbatical? People who haven't had the opportunity to travel in the past, who want to take 6 months off and just go away with a rucksack and then come back. But they do have this worry - "If I'm out of the game, my name will be forgotten and how do I get back into it and will there be somebody else coming along?"
Fortify: And those are all very realistic concerns. It depends on the type of organisation that you are in. (A lot of my answers begin with "depends" because we deal with such a spectrum of individuals and situations here at Fortify).

So, if you are in a permanent and pensionable job, lucky you, you can take a career break, off you go, have a lovely time and your job is still waiting for you when you get back. If you are in the private sector and you are in a business that it is hard to get a job in these days, you would need to think very long and very hard about the reasons why. If you are approaching burn-out, well then yes, it makes sense to think about taking some kind of break.

Specific example: If you are in a business where you are charged out at an hourly rate by your company, you might be able to negotiate with your boss and say, "I want to be on the bench for the next 3-6 months. I need some time off, I don't expect you to pay me, but I'll be back for Project X in the Autumn." I am immediately aware of a number of organisations who are offering that as an incentive and as a cost-saving exercise for themselves.

On the other hand, there are an awful lot of businesses out there that are constantly receiving unsolicited CVs and who are deluged with 500+ applications every time they advertise in the appointments section of the national papers. Now, if you are in that kind of company, you will have to think very long and hard about the benefit - the cost/benefit - of taking off for a while. There's the obvious issue of eating into savings, but if you are in your early 20s, you probably have no savings! However, if you are in your late 20s or beyond, if you have climbed a few rungs on the ladder, it's a very tricky decision to take and one that can have long, long term implications for you. We have had a number of unhappy situations where a client has taken a sabbatical and there has been an 'understanding' in place with the employer, then business takes a turn for the worse, margins are tighter, the competition are squeezing, and the employer isn't in a position to honour their side of the bargain.

Q102: Are you saying then, that it is better to keep going, stick at it and perhaps take early retirement instead?
Fortify: That's deferred gratification on a grand scale. What I would suggest is that if you are in a position that's making you feel like you need to take a year off in order to to recharge the batteries, you're probably not in the right kind of work in the first place.

Q102: What about the belief that the day you really, really don't want to go into work is the day you should leave?
Fortify: Well ... that's certainly the day that you should start examining what's going on out there, what are the prospective sectors - the ones that are going to make you happy going forward.

If you can picture this, there are three circles which need to be present and need to be closely overlapping for a person to be happy in their work. There's the circle of enjoyment (doing stuff that you like), the circle of skill (doing stuff that you are good at), and the circle of adequate financial reward, because work, after all, is a four-letter word. If those three circles closely overlap, if they are pretty much concentric, you will be a happy, fulfilled, productive puppy. If one of those circles is way out of kilter, you can’t be happy. You just can’t. So for instance, if you are thinking about making a career change and, looking forward, you are realising that you will have to take a significant dip in take-home pay in order to make that move, I would say there’s very little point. Because you are just replacing the stress of a career that you are not particularly fond of with the stress of bills that you are not going to be able to afford to pay …

Q: If someone has a well paid senior position, will they have to start at the beginning again, will they have to take paycuts?
Fortify: 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.

Q: OK, finally Rowan, I just want to ask you about CVs, because this is something that seems to confuse most people. Should it be on 1 page, should it be on 3 pages, should there be a covering letter? What is the best CV to have?
Fortify: The best CV to have is the CV that closely addresses the needs and concerns of the only person in this process who really matters and that is the reader, not you. Not you. In job-hunting, people have a perception that it is all about them - it is NOT. It is entirely about the employer - their needs, their worries, their ulcers and headaches. If you can't get yourself into their headspace and understand the pressures that they are operating under and how those pressures have changed, you are not going to be able to write a CV that makes you attractive to them.

Q: That must be hard to do ...
Fortify: If you think of it this way - it is very hard to distinguish yourself from the crowd. For every post that I advertise when we are working on the hiring line with a client, let's say, round figure, 100 CVs come in the door. I review those CVs and I kid you not - they are as indistinguishable as link sausages coming out of the machines in the Denny factory. Most of them have not given real time and attention to the document. Most of them do not recognise what the document is really designed to do. A CV is supposed to do two things and two things only. One - get you to interview, get you on the short list. If it's not doing that, your CV is a waste of paper and time. Two, and much more importantly, if you are a solid candidate, your CV should be setting an agenda for the interview that is likely to follow and you should be 'salting the mine,' in the way that the prospectors of old did, with little nuggets about yourself that you want to talk about at the interview. If you do that, you are taking some control back onto your side of the table.

That is a hard CV to write - no two ways about it - doing that is not easy. So you need to look at the time, effort and, if you are going to hire outside help, money that you are going to have to spend on this process and you need to think about how much time, effort and money you want to invest. So if you are taking 20 hours to research the sector, the organisation and the job and then write a tailored CV in application for a specific role; how much are those hours worth to you? Could you be earning money in that timeframe in which case you have to look at the opportunity cost against the likely return, should you land the job. If it's a high-salary position with good prospects and you succeed in getting it, well then that was a very worthwhile investment.

We have had clients going for CEO positions come in to us and spend up to €2,000 on their research and written application - but they are getting a job that pays €500,000 or more, so it makes sense to make that relatively small investment. Likewise I have had candidates come into me and spend €30 polishing up one detail on a cover letter. Only you can determine how much investment of time, effort and/or money you want to put into this process. It's your career ...

Career management is a funny see-saw. Most people only think of this stuff when they either have to (for instance if they are made redundant) or because there is a live job in front of them. They think that CVs, cover letters and interviews for a specific position are all there is to career management. Not so. Career management is a whole lot more than career guidance for grown-ups. It is really making sure that you understand what's going on in your professional life; that you understand and have realistic expectations about what's going on in the marketplace. Let me ask you a question: In the US now, we all know that things are tough, 3 million jobs lost in the course of the Bush administration and so forth. Times are hard. How many times would you expect to have to move job in your career - have to - because of downsizing, redundancy, hostile takeovers and all of the myriad reasons a job can evaporate overnight?

Q102: I would say ... maybe 5 times?
Fortify: Pretty close, it's actually 7. Seven times you have to come home and explain to your spouse that it has happened again. Seven times talking to your bank manager about deferring mortgage or other payments, while you hunt for a new job. Seven times you are polishing up the CV, getting out there, rattling every bush on your network trying to find out about a live prospect that's coming up. And in many instances, people are having to take a slight dip - pay, benefits or security on the job - in order to claw their way back onto track. Now that's reality and that's a hideous reality. Sorry.

Accordingly, if you are blithely going through life looking for a job that will pay you a bit more 'beer money' and you are up against people, hunting for the same jobs as you, who have recognised that reality and are taking a consummately polished and professional and strategic approach to managing their careers; if you come up against one of them in an interview, you have a drastically rediuced chance of success ...

Q102: Well, Rowan Manahan, we're going to have to leave it there.
Fortify: Sorry about the depressing ending note Venetia, but there is no point in sugar-coating the picture. Career uncertainty is here to stay. Taking active control of your future through career management is going to be an essential skill going forward - I recommend that you get good at it.

Q102: Rowan, thank you as always for your ideas and your time.