Career two-step

- When it comes to switching careers, there's good and bad news. The bad news is that hiring managers are generally looking for proven hires. They wanna fill a vacancy with someone who has already succeeded in exactly that job in exactly that industry. That's unfortunate for someone who's looking to make a career change. You get caught in a catch 22. They wanna hire someone with five years of industry experience, but how can I get five years of industry experience if no one in that industry will hire me? The good news is there's a trick to lowering this hurdle. It just requires two steps. Put simply, it's virtually impossible to change your job title and industry at the same time. You just need to do each of these as a separate step. Voila, the two steps. It's an idea that was first put forth in the book, What Color is Your Parachute? For example, it's not that hard to change your job title while staying in your same company. In fact, a lot of companies offer cross-training. You can move within your company to another function, like from working in a Disney theme park to working in accounting at the same company. But it's much tougher to be working as Mickey Mouse at Disney World and then just jumping to being an accountant at Toyota in one step. It's also not that hard to change your industry while keeping your same job title. So if you're an accountant and wanna leave the hospitality industry, there's likely to be a university or hospital that needs accountants. So if you wanna switch your industry and your job title, which is an excellent move if you're trapped in a really hopeless part of the economy, you just need to make one of those moves at a time. Switch job titles and then switch industries, or switch industries and then switch job titles. It's a pivot approach. Graphically, it might look something like this. For instance, let's say that you're working as a cashier at Walmart and you always wanted to manage a grocery store. But no one's willing to hire you into that role. After all, you don't have experience as a manager and you don't have experience at a grocery store. Hiring you would be a pretty big risk, so whattya do? You just do the pivot and make one move at a time, two steps. You could work your way up from cashier to manager at Walmart and then make the jump from store manager to grocery store manager at a Whole Foods. Alternatively, you could make the jump from department store cashier to a grocery store cashier and then work your way up to grocery store manager. Either might work, but trying to make both of these jumps at the same time would almost certainly fail. Do you think about switching industries or switching jobs, or maybe both? If you want to change everything, consider taking two steps to get to your new dream job, a job that's hopefully recession-proof.