Career Doctor Articles

With the kind permission of the Career Doctor, jfo is able to bring you a series of articles to help you in your work situation and longer term career management

Changing Your Career Path

In an earlier article I described the classic signs – avoidance or deviant behaviour – that will tell you whether or not you are in the right career for your personality. You may be your company’s top sales achiever, but that does not mean you have to stay in sales until you retire, for you might be more successful, and a lot more happier, as, say, a motor mechanic, a web designer, a pet shop assistant or an operational manager.

In this article I have assumed that you have decided that you must try and change your career path – but how do you go about achieving such a transformation?

A MAJOR PROJECT

Having helped numerous clients over many years achieve surprising and often dramatic career changes, the one thing I have learned is that such changes are a major challenge, requiring a huge amount of time, effort and patience on the part of the person wanting to change career. So be prepared for some grief, many rejections, and a huge amount of work before you finally achieve your goal.

Although having said that, I had a 36-year-old client who was just a clerk, but who had a burning desire to better herself. I used our system to help her come to the decision that she wanted to change career and become an HR Officer, but the problem was she had absolutely no HR experience or qualifications, nor did she have a degree. Zero. However within four weeks she had accepted an offer of employment as an HR Officer in a company that sent her to Canada and the USA for training, and paid her a salary of £24,000. Her salary in her previous company was £17,000.

Do not kid yourself that such a fast career change is normal, believe me it is very unusual.

The starting point in any such major project is the agreement of your partner, and his / her active support in your quest to change careers. The effect on your partner will be very substantial and if he / she feels unable or unwilling to support you, then you will need to think very long and hard. However I have met very few partners who are against the concept of career change, indeed most are usually very enthusiastic and encouraging.

Those few people who are against their partners wanting to change career usually worry about the possible effect on the family income, and whether it will affect their summer holidays. I hope your partner is more forward-thinking and less self-centred!

ACTION PLAN

As always, start a project with an action plan. Start with finance. Think about your current earnings and calculate the minimum salary you would be prepared to accept. Your target is that or more, but it may be less than what you are earning in your present job. Discuss your finances with your partner and see what is a realistic figure to aim for.

One of my current clients is a disillusioned actuary who is earning £55,000 pa. but hates his job. He has a target of £26,000 pa. That’s commitment to a career change!

Your next challenge is to identify your target. What new career(s) would suit you best? You can do nothing else until you have identified what your want to achieve. This is, of course, easier said than done. There are plenty of career books in your local reference library, but I will guarantee your eyes will be spinning and your head will be bursting with an overload of information.

In my consultancy we start with two psychometric tests and follow those up with a unique system that enables the client to eventually identify the most appropriate and appealing new careers, using empirical methods and not guess-work.

If you think long and hard about it, you will come up with targets for your new career. I say targets because it is always better to have several options, each one as appealing as the other. If you set your heart on being a brain surgeon, but are unable to get such a job, think how disappointed you will be. Perhaps three or four targets would be safer, as long as they are all realistic and achievable.

In your action plan you need to build in time estimates. I would recommend that you allow a minimum of four months and are prepared for even longer. Convincing a prospective employer that although you are in sales, you would like him to offer you a job as a web designer is never going to be easy.

MAKING THINGS HAPPEN

Having got to this stage, how do you go about the task of changing career? You have a good idea of the alternative careers you fancy, you have agreed with your partner on your minimum target salary, and you are prepared for a long slog.

The next thing is an inventory of your skills and experience. What have you got to offer prospective employers? How much degree of compatibility is there between what you have to offer and what your new career(s) would require?

As a result of my extensive career counselling experience I am convinced that most people simply do not know what they have to offer a prospective employer. They tell me things which I think are irrelevant, and I then have to drag out of them things they have forgotten / omitted, but which I think could be of interest to an interviewer. This is the real secret of matching your skills to their needs.

Now are there any skills gaps that ought to be plugged before you begin this exercise? For example, are your IT skills as good as they may need to be? If not there are plenty of organisations offering IT training. If you would like to break into marketing, perhaps it might be a good idea to enrol on a marketing course at your local college.

What about professional qualifications? Are you eligible to apply for membership of a professional organisation? Let’s say you would be automatically granted membership of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development if you were to apply – but you never did because you don’t like HR work and want to escape into something completely different. Now I would recommend that you did apply for membership, despite your dislike of HR work, as CIPD after your name has a certain ring which will help impress prospective employers. Bull**** baffles brains, as they say!

SELF-MARKETING

If you have decided that you want to follow a creative career – graphic or web designer, journalist, cartoonist, etc – then you will need to build up a portfolio of your creations to impress would-be employers. Such commitment will speak volumes about you and will go a long way towards getting that job offer.

You will notice that up to now I have made no reference to your CV. How can you draft a CV if you don’t know what you want, and have no idea of what you are selling, and to whom? Your CV will be your prime marketing weapon, so spend some time on it. It takes me between five to eight hours to write a CV, and I do these most days of the week and have written hundreds and hundreds of them. So how long will it take you?

Finally, you will need to think about how you are going to market yourself in your new target area(s). Relying on recruitment agencies will be a waste of time in the main, simply because they work in straight lines. If you are a secretary and want another secretarial job, then fine, that’s what recruitment agencies do best. If you are a secretary and you want to break into field sales, by definition you almost certainly will not have any field sales experience, and the recruitment agencies will be highly unlikely to be interested in you. That is unless they have a vacancy for an inexperienced field sales person selling office sundries to secretaries! Unlikely!

There are eleven ways of marketing yourself and you need to research these and put 110% effort into each methodology. Then you will maximise your chances of successfully changing your career path.

Good luck!

The Career Doctor is Eric Hearn, Chartered MCIPD and Managing Director of Milverton Career Solutions Ltd, Ascot, Berkshire, UK.

Contact details:
Tel: 01344 624383
Email: milvertoncareers@btconnect.com
Website: www.careerdevelopment.co.uk