Steps to Take Before Leaping Into a New Career

Do you feel like your career options are limited? Do you have an array of skills but are uncertain about how to put them to work at a job in the outside world. How many times does your career seem locked in a box?

In recent weeks I have been approached about career transitions. For many years, Women At Work directed a program focused primarily on transitioning women from one career to another. Going from housewife to working woman, from PTA mom to full-time employee, or going from one career to another is so typical these days.

How many people do you know who stay with the same company or in the same position for more than seven years? Our clients reflect that. Even more males now are having to move to other careers, yet statistics dictate that it is far more common for women to transform themselves into other fields of opportunity.

But why do we lock ourselves into a box and how do we find the key to unlock the box and morph into something new?

The first critical step is to truly examine you. What would you like to be and where would you like to go? Find a set of skills that excites you and look for opportunities to employ those abilities. Examples include using your talents as a writer to move into the field of grant writing.

An interest in numbers certainly translates into accounting fields, broad and varied as they are. A special talent might even take you down the path of opening your own business. An outgoing personality can often be suited for sales of course, but what about a staff aid to an elected official or a recruiter for an institution of higher learning?

If you are good at details, and let’s admit that not everyone is, have you considered a job as a technical writer?

Each day, even in this challenging economy, I receive job announcements from an extensive data base of supporters and employers. When I quickly pursue the announcements, there are the typical job titles, but there are also some of the most unusual position designations I have run across – quantitative analyst, urban project manager, policy review analyst, cargo coordinator, data administrator, program reviewer … and the list goes on.

Yet when you delve into the descriptions there are some very common job tasks, described in very basic detail. The ideal candidate for each position simply has to respond to the necessary qualifications with concise descriptions.

It is all in one’s ability to transition their history to the new terminology.

Moving onto a new occupation is a great way to expand in so many ways, with new challenges, new colleagues, new expertise and new interests. You can grow yourself with so many offshoots, like a plant blooming in spring with a multitude of buds awaiting the sunlight to shine on it.

You will find a multitude of opportunities simply by transitioning into something that you really thought was outside your comfort zone.  Plant yourself firmly with your abilities and let your mind and talents grow into a new field.