My biggest takeaway of my thirties is that…you don’t have to dance with the one that brought ya…at least not all night. Despite the degrees on my wall being very education-focused, I find myself building an incredibly fulfilling career in the technical world. Whenever I casually mention that I taught high school English for a decade, people look at me incredulously wondering…how on earth did you end up here? The answer: a winding road with some calculated risk-taking. Life, I’m finding out more and more, is not linear.
Where you are heading in the beginning isn’t where you have to end up. I’m a Product Consultant for a software development company, but I use my ninth grade English teacher skills every single day. Back in those public school days, I could never have predicted where I would land, but a series of taking the next best step led me, and continues to lead me, on some incredible adventures.
My first step out of the classroom came from a master’s degree in curriculum development. I took a job as an instructional designer to write curriculum for adult training. Once I landed in the training company, I found that a large portion of my teaching skill set transferred to this new work environment. I worked on several projects in those first few months, but the one that excited me the most was building internal training materials for an IT modernization project. It was my first introduction to business process management and I was hooked.
Thanks to a few supportive women in tech, I got my foot in the IT door with a business analyst role and learned as much as I could as fast as I could. In this role, I again called on skill sets amassed from previous experience in a field seemingly unrelated to business analysis. A few years later, I couldn’t remember a time where I wasn’t a business analyst. I had hit a little bit of a plateau after a seriously steep learning curve, and I was ready for a new challenge. Enter a small tech startup in need of some product consulting and scrum mastery. After contracting with the start up for a while, and grabbing a certification or two to provide some formal support for my work experience, I made the leap to a consulting job.
A little over a year in as a consultant has me reflecting on my journey here. Along the way I have had many conversations with so many people who feel handcuffed to their current position. I hear time and again the fear of the unknown, the concern about whether skills will translate from industry to industry or from one position to another or a general confusion about how to take the first step in a new direction. These are all completely understandable sentiments when thinking about changing careers. It can feel incredibly overwhelming to even think about that sort of overhaul, but it may help to reframe a change like this. Instead of “changing careers” perhaps we consider a more tempered approach. I like to call it shape shifting. In my experience, it looks a little something like this:
Shape-Shifting Steps
List out your strongest skills. These can be incredibly specialized or more industry agnostic
List out the parts of your job that fulfill you the most. For example, maybe you are a teacher and you love the people part of your job, but lesson planning is your worst nightmare. Focus on the people part.
Take a look at industries that rely on a combination of your strongest skills and the parts of your current job that you enjoy.
Update your resume with language that is commonly used in the lexicon of the industry you find appealing.
Ask two trusted people to do “cold reads” of your resume
Look to see if there is a logical certification to obtain that formalizes your body of knowledge in some way OR look for training to bolster a skill set in an industry that appeals to you.
Cast a wide net.
Interview often.
Be selective.
The bottom line is: you are not stuck. You can make a change. If a big change is too overwhelming a thought, break it down into a series of smaller next best steps. At some point, you will come to a step you cannot reverse (ie leaving one job for another) but even that step isn’t binding. You can always just take another step. We spend so much of our lives working…we aren’t meant to be miserable while doing it.
