Onto Something New

We share tips, advice, inspiration and stories for people who are looking to change career or about to embark on career transition [Career Change is Messy]

The business of finding a new career is non-linear in nature, in fact it is just plain messy. In this post I’ll examine some of the reasons behind that and what career changers can do about it.

If you are in IT and want a bigger, better IT job then there are plenty of people out there who will help you. There are recruiters, there are headhunters, there are HR departments all geared up to make those appointments happen. A whole industry devoted to the cause.

If you are in IT and want to get into interior design heaven help you. You are on your own.

The reasons behind that are to do with the recruitment business model and attitudes of the industry towards risk and service.

The regular recruitment industry is not on the side of career changers

A recruiter typically makes (plenty of) money on a handsome commission model based upon first year salary of the person appointed. They might even have agreed a contract whereby if the appointment is not successful in the first say six months they may be liable to refund a portion of that recruitment fee.

What will not be news to a lot of people looking for a job is that the worst recruiters are addicted to this commission beyond all intentions of serving candidates, which goes to explain why so many of them are indescribably rude to unsuccessful applicants.

On the other side of the equation a HR manager with recruitment responsibilities is tasked with providing a stream of qualified candidates to hiring managers in the business. They wish to be seen to be providing a good service to the business and not “wasting people’s time” with off-beam and off-brief candidates and that makes them risk averse. They want candidates that can be seen to hit the ground running and not take too long to reach the point at which they become “productive”.

The net result of these two conspiring factors is the career change candidates are unlikely to be supported through the recruitment process and candidates with more obviously relevant experience will be preferred.

So the direct route to a new career, applying for an available position, is not going to be so open for career changers.

And that makes the career change process, outside of a few of the more common pathways, such as for example getting into teaching, somewhat messy and certainly non-linear.

This lack of an obvious open route is frequently off-putting for people considering making a change. Where do you start?

The Push-Pull Challenge for Career Changers

The problem is compounded by what I think of as the push-pull challenge. That is to say that the people I meet who wish to change career are all pretty clear about what they want to move on from, or the push factor. What they are less clear about is where they want to get to or the pull factor. They know what they’ve had enough of but they don’t yet know what they are drawn to as a destination.

The only way around this is to experiment, explore and try things on for size in different ways. Inevitably that means that a few of the paths explored turn out to be dead ends.

One of the career change books I love about adapting to change is “Who moved my cheese” by Dr Spencer Johnson which (spoiler alert) simply tells the story of two mice whose source of cheese in the maze they live in disappears one day. One of the mice bemoans their situation and sits feeling sorry for themselves the other goes out exploring the maze looking for new source of cheese which he eventually finds. It’s a wonderfully simple analogy and is so relevant to people in a career change situation. And at points the search for a fulfilling career no doubt feels like a maze. It’s messy.

There are exceptions to this rule. So for example doing an MBA is a more accepted mechanism for people who wish to change career. Although MBA grads still face the recruitment challenges outlined above in terms of acquiring relevant experience that gives them credibility in the eyes of recruiters. The reality is that an MBA is a costly and time-consuming investment that is not an option that is open to everyone.

What’s a career changer to do?

The antidote to all this messiness is to become systematic in your exploration of alternative career options. It is more like a scientist trying to discover a new drug – creating hypotheses and then setting up small scale experiments to validate or dispel the hypothesis. If the experiment goes well set up a bigger scale experiment or test another aspect of your theorem as you build your evidence base and your experience.