Stop Dreaming About a Career Change and Start Making It Happen!

You’ve thought about a career change for a while, the ideas rolling around in your head. But for whatever reason you haven’t really acted on any of them. You’re a motivated, talented person…so why are you stuck?

Chances are it’s because you don’t have enough information to make an informed decision. But lucky for you, that’s what I’ll be covering in the next few blogs: one of my very favorite topics, career exploration, and I’ve seen hundreds of times how it can really move things forward.

In my experience, career exploration step is by far the most important step in the career change process, because it can help you make more informed decisions and proceed with more confidence. Please note before I dive in too deep that this is around HOW to explore careers, not WHAT to explore. If you’re looking ideas on career paths to consider, check out a number of articles on our website related to this topic at http://www.careersolutionsgroup.net/?s=career+options .

“In 20 years from now, you will regret the things you didn’t do far more than the things you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, dream and discover. “ Mark Twain

80% of workers dream about changing careers, but in actuality, only 20% ever accomplish any kind of significant change. Career exploration can help you close that gap between having an idea and taking action on it.

Which career exploration strategies are right for you? Check through this list of options for ideas:

Career Research Interviews: This is my all-time favorite career exploration activity–conversations with specialists to have expertise in the areas that you’re thinking about for the purpose of learning from them firsthand what their world of work is like.    So many times as I’ve seen with our clients, people will carry you around a career idea, but then when we dig in and start connecting them to people who are already succeeding in those areas and they interview them about it, over 90% will throw out those first few ideas.

As an example, for a number of years I had clients who were interested in becoming bed and breakfast owners. To them, that seems like a very appealing line of work—something that would be kind of cozy where they could cook and talk to people. So I would hook them up with individuals doing that kind of work (a service that we offer to our career focus clients), and 9 out of 10 times they’d report to me after the interview: “Nevermind, I’m not so interested. There’s a lot of cleaning that has to happen, and it’s a 24/7 job.”  Even if you end up throwing out your first few ideas, which is likely, if you persist with the process, you will eventually gain clarity.

And I want to make clear is that the purpose of these conversations is for research, not job search. It’s not a sneaky way for you to make a connection with someone under the guise of saying, “Oh, your job looks so interesting! Please tell me about it…and by the way, here’s my resume.” That’s not the purpose of these interviews. It’s really for you to be saying, “I’m considering some kind of change. Your area looks interesting to me. I want to learn more from someone who has a good deal of experience doing this kind of work.” Here are questions to cover:

• “How did you get into your kind of work?” What I love about that question is that it’s open-ended, they can take it from a lot of different angles and almost always people will start off by saying, “Oh, my story is very unique.” Well, everyone’s story is unique, but it’s fun for people to talk about themselves, which is another reason why I love career research interviews. It lets people talk about themselves and you’re going to see the best of them in this kind of conversation. You’ll learn some good things.
• “What are things that you really like about your career, and what are things that you don’t like so well?” And I’ve sometimes had people ask me, “Is it a good idea to ask someone the things they don’t like?” And definitely, it is. Number one because generally, people are looking for opportunities to talk about what frustrates them.  When I talk about this topic in live presentations, I usually do a survey at this part of the conversation where I ask people to raise their hand if they would be happy to talk about what frustrates them in their work. And you’ll usually get like 80, 90% of people throwing their hands up in the air, “I’m happy to talk about what doesn’t make me happy in my work!”And another reason it’s much better for you to know on the front end what they perceive to be the downside so that you can make an educated decision.
• Finally, ask “Who else do you respect that I should also interview? So as you are learning about different specialties from people who are actually doing that kind of work, you’ll likely hear things in the conversation that will pique your interest more than others. Like there may be an aspect of their work that is especially interesting to you. For example, if someone is a business analyst and then they’re talking about how they have to determine where to set up new locations in the market, you really like the location data part of it, then you can dig in further on that and ask who else do they know that’s maybe even more involved in that. And as someone with expertise in their area, they would be able to send you to others for more information. This is the basic barebones interview outline: “How did you get into your work, what are the pro’s and con’s, and who else do you recommend that I interview?”
• Additional questions: Other things you can ask are: “What kind of training do you recommend?” and “What are typical pay ranges: entry-level, mid-level, and senior level. “ Anything else you might ask should be something the specialist can answer without needing to go to the library to look up. Like “What is the anticipated growth percentage of your line of work in the next 10 years?” They may or may not know that, but that’s something you can get off of a data site.

As you’re doing these conversations, when you hit upon an area that appeals to you, have at least three conversations with specialists in that niche.  You’ll probably have between five and 15 of these conversations before you see your path more clearly.

How can you find specialists who would be willing to talk to you? What we do with our clients is based on their interests; I will help them get very specific on what it is they want to learn about. And then we just go on the hunt for specialists. We have a very broad network and may know people already or it could be just a simple search on LinkedIn to find people with that specialty. Not everyone will jump right in and agree to be interviewed, but most people who are happy to talk to you like their work and those are the people you want to talk to so you can get some good information.

Tune in next time to learn about Career Experiments, another helpful and mind-opening career exploration technique.