Changing Lanes: A Guide To Transitioning Careers

You may have climbed the ladder of success and arrived where you wanted to be, only to feel as though you’ve still got so much that you want to do and learn. Often, we face significant challenges in our career progression, and the idea of pushing ourselves forward can be the thing that keeps life interesting and exciting. We might reach our goal and feel a bit lost and have a yearning for something else.

Big changes in our lives too can often cause us to take stock of what we are doing. Maybe the loss of someone close, or a life-changing illness will make us question what we held true about our chosen career path.

Another crossroads might appear when we suddenly lose a job that we’ve held for so long. The uncertainty of not knowing where we fit into the career market can leave us feeling lost.

When any of these things happen, we need to think about what we want to do, and this can be daunting. You may feel as though you’ve had all of your eggs in one basket and you don’t have the skills or experience within other jobs to transition smoothly.

List Your Skills

If you are in that situation, take the time to list your skills. Don’t think about the actual job you’ve been doing, just the skills you’ve been utilizing. These might include communicating important information in a concise and easily understandable manner. Dealing, face to face with customers and clients and using in-depth knowledge of something specific to sell a product or service. You might have managed a team or had to deal with conflict within the workplace. There may have been operational concerns that you’ve highlighted and then suggested changes. Whatever your previous role, you will have transferable skills.

Get Help

You don’t need to do this on your own. Changing your career is a big life move, and you will need all of the help and advice you can get. Many recruitment firms and head hunters are well equipped on advising people who are looking for a career transition. Recruitment firms will be well placed dealing with people such as yourself who have progressed within a career and are now looking for a completely new challenge. It is in their best interest to find the right candidates for the right roles, and they will try their best to help you into one of the roles they have been tasked with filling.

If you are looking to retrain, there are many options out there that might suit your lifestyle and needs. You can easily find out more about retraining, and if you have a specific set of skills, how these skills can be used in your favour. When we retrain, we can often dismiss our old skills, but these can work in our new choice of career, or even when going back to college or university, it can provide us with a unique perspective. You might want to return to formal education and go to college or university to get a qualification, or you may choose to take any number of online courses available within your chosen area. Often, these can be completed around your current job. Speak with the admissions team at your local college or university and get some advice.

Update Your Resume

It may have been some time since you have needed to update your resume. There is a possibility that if you have got quite far in your career, then it has been through moving up the ranks within one organization. Where this is the case, you may not have needed your resume, and probably haven’t given it too much thought. If you are looking for a change in career, however, you will need to amend your resume to reflect this change.

Think about emphasizing your transferable skills and look for buzzwords that you can use that will be relevant to your future career. You will have a pretty good idea of what kind of work you will be applying for, use examples of elements of the job that are similar to anything that you have ever experienced.

Make sure you make room for your most significant achievements. There is no need to talk about an entry level job that you were in twenty years ago, especially if it means missing off important information that really sells you now.

Bring your resume up to date by removing outdated phrases such as ‘references available by request.’ Your future employer will always seek out references if they want to, and they will ask you for them when they need to, don’t waste valuable space that can be used on selling yourself.

Read it through multiple times and make sure that the first half of your resume is impactful and exciting. It can be hard to make sure that your resume remains at the top of the pile, so make sure it stands out!