How to Find the Courage to Change Careers

People often want to make a change in their careers but few do until they’re forced to shake things up. Fear is often one of the main obstacles that hold people back from making a transition.

Fortunately, more and more people are finding the courage to change careers thanks to some self-reflection during the pandemic. LinkedIn News Editor Andrew Seaman has talked to several experts on #GetHired with Andrew Seaman about how people can change careers during that time.

This episode brings together the advice of three all-star Get Hired guests: former Olympic speed skater Apolo Ohno ; career coach Christopher Taylor , aka “The Occupation Optimist; and coach Austin Belcak , the founder of Cultivated Culture. You can listen to the episode below or by clicking here.

TRANSCRIPT: How to Find the Courage to Change Careers

Andrew Seaman: We all have that friend or relative who hates their job. It's all they can talk about. Or maybe you are that friend or relative. In either case, this episode is for you. That's right. Today we're talking all about changes we can make in our careers so we can get to a place where we're at least not miserable. Let's get to it.?

From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's managing editor for Jobs and Career Development. Each week on Get Hired, we talk about leveling up. Sometimes we talk about finding work. Other times we talk about excelling where you are right now. And through it all, we focus on how to stay true to yourself in the process.

If you've been following this podcast or any of my work on LinkedIn, you know I have two truths when it comes to work and careers. First, work doesn't have to make you miserable, and two, you should get to decide the relationship that you have with work. I want to focus this episode on the first truth. In my experience, most people start out liking their jobs, then things change, people change, work changes, and the joy we may have felt starts to slip away. It's natural.

So maybe it's time to make a purposeful change to get things back on track. It doesn't have to be dramatic changes, like going back to college. It could be just starting a conversation to find a new role or change your responsibilities. Your specific path will depend on your circumstances. To help you get started, we've pulled together some of the best advice we've received over the past few months from our guests about initiating change in your career. To start, let's dive into one of the initial barriers people encounter when trying to make a change: fear. Here's what Olympic speed skater Apolo Ohno shared with us about overcoming the fear of change.

Apolo Ohno: And if you decide to make a big change, that's hard to do, right? All you've ever known is this path for the past 20 to 30 years. Are you good at anything else? And you really question your place in the world because you had a sense of purpose when you were doing something before because you knew that routine. But don't forget, in order for that growth to happen, sometimes you have to pour that cup of knowledge out and start again with a beginner's mind. No one wants to start over. No one wants to climb the mountain, go back down to the bottom and then go back up again. That's not something that's interesting to people. It's really daunting, but I'm telling you, it's still possible. And so instead of operating, and I talk in this book around a state of “FOPO,” and this terminology was given to me by a close friend, Dr. Michael Gervais, who's a sports psychologist in Southern California. And we were having a discussion on his podcast and he was saying something in the realm of, "Apolo, many people don't live their most authentic self because they're operating out of FOPO, this fear of other people's opinions." And when he told that to me, it resonated so well because I had lived much of my life in a glass bowl or so I thought. I thought the world cared and wanted and taught. This is all between my own two ears. Like this conversation, it wasn't real. It was all inside my own brain. It was fabricated. And so now I'm trying to think about, “what is the best possible path moving forward?” while understanding that and then being in alignment with my purpose. So I could've easily gone down a variety of different other businesses and paths and career choices, but I chose this one, not because it's the best or it is easy or because it's natural. I chose it because it's hard. And I think that inherently designed in that is an ability for me to grow and then help others in that same process.

Andrew Seaman: That was former Olympic speed skater, Apollo Ohno. All right, once you've overcome the initial jitters around making a change in your career, the next step is to realize your value and that you have so much to offer a company. So even if you're making a big leap and looking for a new job, realize that you're not starting from square one. You're building on a strong foundation based on all of your work and life experiences, no matter how "relevant" they may seem at first glance. Chris Taylor, who is known as the Occupation Optimist, and is a LinkedIn Learning instructor, talked about taking that leap when applying for work.

Christopher Taylor: But the first thing you want to remember is you don't have to check every box of the job description’s “nice to have”s, right? So job descriptions are typically written by recruiters who, at most, collaborate with hiring managers, but they typically haven't done the job themselves. No one who's putting together a job description is expecting you to have everything that's listed there. And so if you've got six out of 10, you're looking good, go for it. If you come across a job you're excited about and the job sounds like something that you can do and you believe that you're able to sell yourself, you want to go for it. And now by sell yourself, I mean putting together a three to five bullet pitch of what you think that you can do for the company or what it is that you think that you bring to the table. Now, this is going to draw a bridge between where you are now and where you want to be, right? We also want to keep in mind that skill gaps tend to be especially evident in career as well as industry transitions. So one, you want to do your homework on what your position of interest entails. Two, you want to check out LinkedIn to see profiles and backgrounds of those who hold similar roles. How do you compare? Can you start the same way that that person did? And then third, you want to consider ways to quickly build skills. So one, I recommend volunteering your existing skills to an organization, strategically focusing on the skills that you want to acquire and pitching similar ways to help that organization. So that's one quick way to build skills. Two, offer low price services via freelancing. Three, I would say explore online courses and certifications. So right now, today, there's so many different ways to learn new skills, really from the comfort of your own home, from your living room, there are a number of free or low price opportunities out there. So like LinkedIn Learning is the perfect example. And if you can't connect with an organization or if you're having trouble acquiring freelance clients, consider getting to work on your own. And this could look like bringing together some of your own designs, writing content, putting together a project or two that wasn't necessarily assigned by an organization, but at least now you're really building those skills.

Andrew Seaman: That was Chris Taylor, the Occupation Optimist. Now, if you're looking to make a big change, you may not want to jump in feet first if you haven't dabbled in that area before. After all, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence… until you get there. One good way to test out a change or gain experience is to make it a side hustle before it becomes a full time hustle. Austin Belcak, who is founder of Cultivated Culture, knows a bit about that approach. Here's what he told us about what he did when he first started considering a change to his career path.

Austin Belcak: I rolled up my sleeves, I actually got in there, and then I started to offer freelancing services, at first for free to just local businesses. I said, "I'll do your marketing, I'll help you optimize your website for SEO,” and this other stuff, and once I got some results, I actually went out and I started charging people and I started 50 bucks a month and then a hundred and I worked my rates up and eventually I was just getting paid to learn, which was pretty awesome. So that's one option for people. The other is to just get out there and start building stuff. So if you're in a field where this is readily available, maybe you want to be a software engineer, maybe you want to be a data analyst, maybe you're a UX designer, it's really, really easy to go out there and just start creating projects that you're excited about. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to go audit companies. So maybe you have your list of 10 to 15 target companies. Let's say that you're a user experience designer, you could actually go audit an aspect of that company’s user experience for their website, for their app, for their product. And then you can build out a case study and you can put it up on your personal website. You can put it in the featured section of your LinkedIn profile. That's another way to go about this. A third way is to actually just start writing about the topic. So one of my friends, he worked in finance, he actually went back to get his MBA, and then he realized he wanted to work in blockchain. And there's no traditional path for blockchain. You just kind of have to build the experience yourself and work your way in. So he said, "I'm going to write 75 articles about blockchain." Essentially it was a forcing function for him to get out there and educate himself in this new space. That also has the added benefit of creating visibility, right? So if you made it a goal to create one post about your target industry for the next 60 days on LinkedIn, not only are you going to educate yourself in this new space, but you're also creating this breadcrumb trail of evidence of you actually learning everything. But the most important thing here is that we can't just wait for somebody to offer us the experience. By going out and creating these results for ourselves, that's really how we're going to be able to make stuff happen.

Andrew Seaman: That was founder of Cultivated Culture Austin Belcak. Hopefully you've been able to take a bit away from today's episode to learn what you can do to kick off a change to put you back on the right track.?

Remember, it's up to you to put our advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation. You can also join my weekly Get Hired live show every Friday on the LinkedIn news page. And if you like this episode, leave us a rating on an Apple podcast. It helps people like you. Yes, you, find the show. And of course, we'll continue this conversation next week. Right here, wherever you like to listen. Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Michele O'Brien with help from Gianna Prudente, Derek Carl, Taisha Henry, and Elias Avalos. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show, Florencia Iriondo is head of original audio and video, Dave Pond is head of news production, Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn, and I am Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.