Taking the Plunge: Navigating the transition from Corporate to Social Impact Sector (Part 1: The experiment)

Quick note: This is the first post in a series where I share my learnings and experiences to help those planning a move to the social impact sector from a typical corporate setup. While the lines between these sectors have blurred over the years, the transition is still a significant leap.

Quick terminology note: I use "social impact sector" to broadly refer to organisations actively working for societal good, including NGOs, CSOs, philanthropies, development consulting, not-for-profits, public policy organisations, social centres and institutes, think tanks, etc.

A Bit of Context

In the beginning of 2014, I was transitioning out of my role in Hewlett Packard’s Industry Consulting Group, when personal circumstances drove me to experience the social impact sector as a safe enough experiment. And while the rest of that personal story is reserved for my close friends and therapist, the key words for our context here are “experience,” “safe enough,” and “experiment.”?

Over the years, many colleagues, friends, and strangers on LinkedIn have reached out to me to help them make the decision of moving from the corporate sector to the social impact sector. My answer to them has always been to first “experience” it, in the “safest way possible” for them. This allows you to learn not just about the sector and the way social impact organisations operate but, more importantly, whether your skills and existing experience have a tangible value add to the sector.

You might notice that I didn’t use phrases like “passion” or “drive to make a change.” The passion to want something good to happen in the world and the passion to contribute to it don’t necessarily translate into making that a career choice.?

The Societal Good Contribution Spectrum

Those who have worked with me know that I love to think in spectrums, and here’s how I think of the societal good contribution spectrum:

If your ‘passion’ to contribute is satisfied by anything from L1 to L3, you can still do good in the world in many ways. But this guide will help if you are thinking about L4 to L6 and want to consider whether professionally working in the social impact sector is the right call for you.

My experiment

Back in 2014, I started working with an NGO while serving a 90-day notice period with Hewlett Packard. The good/frustrating thing was that there was no clear job description. I was working with people who had their own jobs while supporting this NGO. I dipped my toes in various tasks, from designing reports and infographics to writing proposals and developing tools in Excel. This gave me firsthand experience of the sector and the challenges of getting policies actionable at the last mile. I remember googling “Janani Shishu Suraksha Yojana” and learning everything about it (Having a management consulting background helped; I remember doing a similar exercise to read about Longitudinal and Helical Submerged Arc Welding over a weekend before doing a plant assessment).

If I found reading about it tough, doing it was tougher. An NGO going to a village to help people get disability certificates from the government sounds simple, but it’s a whole production. Having a client (either community or government) not aligned with what you’re doing, mostly behaviour change, makes it even more difficult. But I loved this challenge. I learned about schemes I had never heard of, filed RTIs, and analysed data on Iron and Folic Acid tablet availability. I was so inspired by the work that I offered to partake in every initiative and review meeting, riding on the high and novelty of it all. This was a mistake!

The picture started changing when I joined my next full-time job with PwC. The rigour of cost optimization projects at PwC, compounded with the loss of novelty in designing the same newsletters month after month, hit me hard. I started prioritising what was paying the bills. I am still ashamed of the fact that I created a dependence and then did not deliver. But that taught me an important lesson about safe experimentation: Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It also made me realise that I wanted more of the sector, and the only way to achieve that was to formalise my involvement. More about that in the next post!

What I learned

1. It’s crucial to test the waters. Unlike other corporate jobs, the social sector offers many ways to do this.
2. Develop a realistic experiment for yourself, commit x hours for y months and commit to doing abc. The more you structure this, the better you can balance competing priorities
3. Don’t expect to get work on only things you are good at. You may end up cold calling strangers to volunteer for the cause (I did that!). The good part is, by doing many of these out of comfort zone things, you may end up rediscovering yourself (I found a way to use my graphic designing skills after many many years)
4. Be ready to learn, from guidelines, from people, from community, from everyone! That is the barter, in exchange of the hours I put in, I got a chance to learn about the sector, the communities I wished to work with and policies that govern societal good!

Thanks for staying with me until the end of this long post! Stay tuned for the next instalment as I continue to share my journey and experiences transitioning from the corporate world to the social impact sector. And I hope reflecting on where you are on your contribution journey can help you decide your next steps.?

PS: Oh, forgot to mention, before all of this happened, at different points in my life I had moved across the initial levels of the contribution spectrum: I have done my share of blood donation at drives, donated weighing scales at rural Anganwadi Centres, done projects directly with local government bodies. So I have had my share of Level 0 - 3 in my life!