How to Plug your Experience Gaps during Career Shifts

How do you get the experience you need, when you don’t have the experience in the first place?

This is a big problem not only for career starters, but also if you want to shift the direction of your existing career. In fact, the frustrations can be amplified.

You may have many years of work experience, but it may not be the right experience for the new role you want.

You know that if someone only gives you the chance, you can apply all your hard-won skillsets to get going and then learn the rest very quickly while on the job.

The dilemma is that employers need you to hit the ground running. They don’t want to wait for you to fill your skills and experience gaps, they just want you to get the job done well now. They don’t want to take the risk.

As exasperating as it can be, they do have a point.

You can’t expect someone to hire you to do risk management when you’ve only ever done marketing.? You can’t expect an organisation to pay you a high salary for executing on an organisational strategy when you’ve only ever provided strategic advisory. If someone else already has the data skills that form part of the role, why should they pay you to practice them?

I tried to convince potential employers that I was ready for new roles I had not taken on before. As much as they appreciated my abilities as a director, my experience gaps specific to these roles and contexts unavoidably came through. I could not hide them and someone else got the job.

It took just one other person who had the right experience for me to miss out on my dream role.

This left me feeling like the only option I had to mould my new career was to go for an entry level position with a low salary and work my way back up.

Until I realised this was not the case. There were other options.

I decided that I was going to present myself as the highly experienced and qualified professional that I am and take the initiative to plug my experience gaps.

Start with your natural inclinations

I started by reflecting on the natural journey I was on that had led me to wanting to be involved in the careers, employability and experiential learning industries.

While my qualifications are business-centric, my personality has intrinsically tended towards helping others directly, and I have always been most fulfilled when coaching and developing others and making a real impact.

I have experienced the struggles of career change first hand and can relate to others in the same circumstances.

I spent a lot of time researching career challenges and how to overcome them, and then applied them to my own situation, which in turn made me realise this was something I wanted to do as my new vocation.

What are your natural inclinations that have led you to decide to shift to a different type of role? What personality traits do you have? What do you enjoy spending your time doing? What is going to challenge you and grow you at the same time? Will you be able to make a good living?? Does it fit in with your other life goals?

Work backwards from a role you want

Know the gaps you need to fill to achieve your career goals. The easiest way to do this is to work backwards from someone else who has already flourished on a similar path.

Look at their online profiles, their experience, their qualifications and their accomplishment stories. Do this with more than one person and you will start to see a pattern.

On my own journey, I looked at several profiles of successful careers coaches and owners of careers-support related companies. Many of them had formal qualifications in coaching or careers coaching, with a track-record of success stories.

My experience gaps were clearly in careers coaching, and I needed to study part-time as a careers coach.

Looking at advertised job roles that are in line with your career aspirations is another great way to determine any gaps you have. Make a list of all the skills and experience the job specifications ask for and make another list of your gaps. Be honest with yourself. Transferable skills may not be enough, especially if it’s a totally different role from what you have done before.

The harder, but highly effective way to do this is to put yourself out there for job opportunities for the roles that you want and go for interviews. If the gaps are there, the interview itself will highlight them for you.

I thought I was well prepared for a job interview, and having made it through to the final stages I was feeling confident. I was thrown off when they peppered me with questions relating to tasks I had no real experience in. I simply couldn’t answer them.

I made a note of these as my experience gaps as a positive way to approach the rejection.

Create your own work experience

I quickly realised that waiting for someone else to fill my gaps was not going to work.

I looked for experiential learning opportunities, but there were none relating to my specific career objectives.

So, I decided to create my own work experience.

I set up a not-for-profit that would give me direct access to those in need of help with their careers. I offered free career guidance sessions to build up my testimonials. I wrote articles (like this one) giving advice based on my own career challenges. I am now setting up a pilot programme to help others navigate career change through the not-for-profit, while gearing up to get my professional development recognised by a professional association.

In a few short months, I have been able to plug a good deal of my experience gaps, and fill other gaps, such as building a network and developing and implementing strategies in the context of the UK market.

The not-for-profit itself is becoming my current source of income, but who knows what the future may bring. If I ever do need to apply for a new role, it will be with solid experience in the industry I love.

Your own work experience need not be the setup of a not-for-profit. Put up your hand in your current job and let people know that you are there to help them with tasks you want to gain experience in. If you are not presently employed, ask family members and friends if you can help them with their businesses and tasks.

You can also run your own personal project, whereby you set yourself a task and achieve it, and create hard evidence of this experience in the process. For example, if you want to showcase your marketing skills, set up your own podcast and market it. If you want to develop your management skills, run a community project in your area. Build your own robot if you want to get into robotics, develop your own software programme if you want to get into software, train people who need your help if you want to get into training.

Take control of your own career

You have the power in your hands to fashion your career in any way you want.

By knowing what you want to achieve, listing your experience gaps and then taking strong, practical actions to fill them over time, anything is truly possible.

At ELE Hub, we are here to support you with your career and employability. Attend our upcoming event ‘Help for Career Changers’ where you will have the opportunity to ask top experts your questions and connect to practical experience opportunities.

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