Many of us choose careers randomly soon after graduating without getting much into details about the future growth options of the chosen career. Mostly we accept any job/career that pays us well and proceed ahead with it. Initial years in the chosen career always seem to be very exciting but sooner or later we realize that we are not the right fit for the chosen career or want to switch to a different career due to no future growth in the chosen career.
This is a very overwhelming situation, the existing career doesn’t hold much of a future prospect, and switching the career is very challenging. We don’t know where to start how to start or which career to choose. In such a scenario following are some of the factors what we need to consider before we jump into career transition mode:
Skills Assessment
You need to sit down and introspect, list down all the skills you have gained throughout your professional and educational career. Understand your strong skills, the skills which need polishing. Once you have done this, you can start checking different jobs on the job portals and read articles about different industries/sectors.
Based on the information gathered you can up-skill yourself, learn the skills which are required by the job profile you are targeting. Check if your present organization has a similar position if yes then talk to your manager and try if you can get a lateral movement.
Talk to Experts.
LinkedIn will come handy for this, you can connect with people who are in a similar job or career which you are targeting. Try talking to them, seek some advice on what are the prerequisites for the targeted job/position.
Try to talk to as many people as possible, understand the hurdles they had to go through. Conduct an informational interview. You can also talk to people performing the required task in your organization to understand how it is carried out. For example, if you wish to get into Digital Marketing and in your company there is a separate team handling that then talk to them, try to job shadow them, learn from them how digital marketing is carried out in your organization as this will greatly help you during an interview.
Learn Required Skills
By now you should be aware of your skills and the skills required for the targeted career after performing self-assessment and talking to experts.
This is the time to start honing your skills, acquiring new skills, unlearning, and relearning. Preparing for the storm ahead, because career transition is no easy task you might have to start from scratch, come out of your comfort zone, unlearn and relearn. Learning is a continuous process to stay relevant to professional growth.
Now is the time to time to rework your resume and start applying for the jobs. Try to customize your resume based on the targeted job position and attend as many interviews as possible. The questions asked in the interview will help you in preparing yourself for the required skills.
Even if you are not sure if you will take up the offer in the required company but still attend the interview, every interview sessions is a great source of knowledge because the interviews are conducted by experts and they know what they want and hence you get to know what is required in the market.