How to Shift Careers Naturally

I felt embarrassed about the number of times my career had shifted in my lifetime, until I read the statistics.

The average person changes careers 5 to 7 times, but the World Economic Forum is predicting that this will increase to an average of 12 times in a lifetime.

12 times!

This means that my non-linear career and now 6th big career shift is something that is becoming the norm, and something that I can in fact be proud of.

If shifting careers is now normal behaviour, then surely the way we make these shifts should also be normalised?

Yet, as I immerse myself in my next career shift as a director of a not-for-profit with resources for fluid careers, I find the paradigm of the painful career shift still very much alive.

This paradigm is further perpetuated by long-held, outdated notions of job role, recruitment, and training practices.

Career change should not be viewed as a painful process, but as a natural one that a lot of us will experience at some point, if not at many points in our journeys.

We all need to embrace the mindsets and the skillsets that will help us to navigate these foreseeable career shifts and make them a customary part of our lives.

Anticipate career shifts in your lifetime

I believed for a long time that my 25-year career was a non-traditional one, filled with twists and turns due to my unbridled desire to experience new things relevant to different stages of my life.

I now know it has in fact been a normal one, with a handful of key career changes along the way.

I have been a training company owner, an entrepreneurship author and coach, an executive education professional, an entrepreneurship education professional, a consultant and now a not-for-profit founder.

If I could give my younger self any advice, it would be that my career was going to change as my life changed, as my perspectives matured, and as external circumstances that I could not control changed.

It was a natural, inevitable process, as change certainly is.

If based on current workplace trends you know that your career is going to change a few times, then you need to embed readiness for change into your professional development.

This will ease the transitions and make them more natural and far less painful.

Make continuous development a habit

Employability is not a once off thing that you need when you apply for your first job. It is an ongoing part of you that needs to be nurtured throughout your career.

I have moved between my own businesses, and employment, and back again.

My ability to make a name for myself and earn an income, whether I was self-employed or employed, required the same fundamentals.

I needed bankable core skills – the hard skills that give you the ability to do things for others, be it individuals or organisations.

My core skills are related to learning, development, events and coaching. It is these skills that enabled me to both develop my own offerings and be hired by others.

I am also currently developing my strategic leadership skills, supplemented by formal strategic leadership studies.

This gives me options for my future career. I can continue to grow the not-for-profit or move into a strategic leadership role in similar industries.

You need to know what your own core skills are and continuously develop them, strengthen them and add to them to ensure that you are always simultaneously employable or self-employable, as you never know what career twists await you.

Are you skilled at software development, marketing, accounting, teaching, people development or creating art?

What do you need to do to keep your core skills current and relevant??

You may need to learn entirely new core skills along the way, depending on how big the career shift is.

I also needed soft skills – the skills that give you the ability to work with others and build relationships.

When I worked in my own businesses, things like communication and collaboration were less formal.

When I worked for others, things like presenting, teamwork and managing stakeholder relationships were more formal.

With organisations adopting agile behaviours, I find that soft skills now sit somewhere between the two.

Soft skills are best learned and practiced while engaging in hard skills work and modelling others, but it can be worth investing in short bursts of training to improve upon your weakest soft skills.

I have always had a fear of public speaking, and public communication gives me anxiety, yet this is something I must do often and is a soft skill I need to give more focused attention to.

Know your own weakest, but much needed soft skills, and get the support you need to strengthen them.

The right combination of hard and soft skills throughout your life is what makes you highly employable (or self-employable).

If you lose touch with your continuous development, you are likely to lose touch with the marketplace.

Learn how to ‘learn by experience’

‘Learning by experience’ is a practical form of continuous learning.

I incorporate practical learning into just about everything I do.

If I engage in academic study, I make sure I have a practical project running alongside in order to apply what I am learning.

If I want to improve upon a soft skill, such as my public speaking, I don’t just attend a course, I create opportunities for myself where I can practice that soft skill, such as hosting events or giving my own talks.

Whenever I work with others who are more accomplished in a certain skill, I watch what they do and try to mimic them when I engage in that skill myself.

My not-for-profit originally started as a way for me to apply and practice new skills.

A for-profit start-up venture could serve a similar same purpose.

If the venture works, it could be your new career for a while.

If it doesn’t, it’s a highly efficient way to learn and practice a whole range of skillsets, including leadership, management, building teams, business development, influencing, communication and any hard skills you applied in the process.

You then have a range of skillsets that you can add to your CV, with solid examples to back up what you did.

If starting a new venture is not viable, you can offer your help to others, such as volunteering at a charity.

While these are informal, self-motivated ways of learning by experience, look out for formal opportunities too, such as adult internships, skills bootcamps and part-time work.

Follow your natural inclinations

Trying to figure out what you are passionate about and then pursuing that passion can be an elusive ‘end-of-the-rainbow’ quest.

In my own pursuit for a career based on passion, I found that the flame burned brightly at the beginning, then was dimmed by the reality of daily work tasks that had less to do with passion and more to do with what must be done to get something to succeed.

Yet, I can trace common threads in everything I have done throughout my working life.

These are my natural inclinations – the things I tend to towards.

I like to always be developing others in some way, while making an innovative impact. Personality assessments seem to echo this fact about me.

At times in my career where I was fighting my natural inclinations, I under-performed and felt like I needed to shift out of that situation.

Being stuck in a role where I had very little strategic say in the impact of the programmes being delivered made me miserable.

Being in roles where I had leeway to innovate while helping others grow made me blossom.

Follow your own natural inclinations, and you will not only know how to shift your career, but also when to shift your career.

Stop seeing your career as a race against others

At times in my life I have felt “less-than” because I wasn’t at the level of the people who I wanted to emulate.

In hindsight, this was without foundation.

If I was just at the beginning of a fresh point in my career that someone else had already been doing for four years, how could I even begin to make the comparison?

Some good advice I have taken heed of is that life is not a race against other people.

There will always be people “better-than”, “more-accomplished-than”, “more recognised-than” at something than you are.

You cannot possibly be skilled at everything.

You can however become good at improving yourself and at mastering the skills that you need in order to flex your career.

Put some time in your diary (at least once a quarter) to review your employability levels in the context of current workforce trends.

Look at your existing skills, skills you are working on and any new skills you may need going forward.

Then look at any skills you need to master, the skills that you need to become really good at that will help you shine.

Make a list of these skills and incorporate them into your continuous learning and learning-by-experience journeys.

Rely on existing resources wisely

Some career shifts are swift, and others take time, especially if you need to acquire new skills or build new networks.

For those career shifts that you know will take time, make sure you have the resources in place to enable the shift.

Don’t be hasty to quit your job or to shut down your business if this is your only source of income, or you could find yourself scrabbling for a job you don’t want.

I quit a well-paying job a few months too soon, and it made my career shift into a consulting role very challenging when the consulting work did not materialize as quickly as I had hoped.

Career shifts need to be grounded in realistic notions.

Finish any tasks you are currently busy with

Results that you have achieved are important for your career.

Results give you credibility with organisations and individuals. They also boost your confidence and enable you to showcase yourself as a highly competent person.

It is important to complete any tasks or projects you are busy with during any career shifts. Unfinished stories are hard to tell, they leave doubt about your ability.

Job interviewers like to use competence-based interviews, where results are a key part of their expectations of you when you answer their questions.

Evidence-based journeys also have become crucial for professional development and enable strong testimonials.

The results achieved do not need to be the best in the world. They do need to demonstrate that you took on a task, completed it and that there was an outcome.

Keep track of your accomplishment stories. Document them, keep a record of any evidence and seek testimonials as you go.

Whether you are applying for a new role, or looking for new customers, evidence of what you have done will make you far more appealing to others and enable you to make career shifts more naturally.

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