5 Steps To Make A Career Change
Career changes are common, but they can also be challenging. Changing your field, position, or workplace comes with a myriad of issues. You must conquer such challenges to make a successful change. Before you take a leap, you must be aware of what you will have to face during this transition.
Making a career change demands dedication and hard work. People change careers because they lack fulfillment, are not satisfied, need more variety, or want flexibility in their working days or hours. Landing an interview can be challenging when switching careers to a new field, depending on your transferrable skills or experience.
Here are five steps to accomplish a change to a new career with purpose and success.
Self-Reflection
You may want to change or shift a career because you are dissatisfied or unhappy in your current workplace or job. However, you might not be aware of the specific reasons that are causing these feelings. If you are not feeling fulfilled at your current job, you must consider whether there is a personal reason or a professional one that is causing distress at work.
The professional reasons generally include a toxic work environment, a challenging boss, or misalignment with your job tasks. As for personal reasons, you might want a better salary or the opportunity to learn a new skill. You may decide to switch careers because you want more flexibility in your schedule. You need to participate in self-reflection to help you gain clarity in considering a change.
Vision For A New Career
Before you start indulging in the logistics of your change, you have to evaluate your idea of success. For this purpose, you need to imagine the typical day at your dream job and how you would feel doing it. How do you envision the workplace environment? Whom will you interact with? What activities are you likely to follow? How can a new job be more fulfilling?
The answers to these questions will help you assess what you are missing at your current job and how your new career would satisfy those shortcomings. As a result, you will be able to develop the vision for your new career and what you would gain from it! These answers will help you determine what you need to do in order to achieve your vision.
What Skills Do You Need?
Are you certain that your current skill set is sufficient for your intended career? If not, what skills are you lacking to become an attractive candidate for the new job? Do you need to take classes? If so, there are thousands of free online courses available that will help you build your skillset. Beyond learning new skills, you might want to gain some work experience in your new field. Reach out to someone in the field and conduct some research to see what additional skills you would need.
Make An Action Plan
In developing your action plan, you must consider your timeline. You must break down the timeline into smaller milestones to satisfy the respective skills that would be required. Schedule the weekly or daily tasks to achieve your eventual success.
Your action plan will ensure that you are completing the tasks on time and achieving the necessary skills. The most surprising fact is that these small steps have a snowball effect, enabling you to feel confident and to gain momentum!
Engage With Your Network
When you are working on a career change with your action plan in place, you have to start engaging your network. Reach out to your current network to see who might help you reach your new career field. Additionally, you want to utilize your LinkedIn profile to engage with the new connections to grow your network in this new field. It will help you connect with people in the field so you can learn from them and build relationships with them. This will allow you to ask for their assistance if you apply for a position in their company.
Are you ready to find your new career?
Use the above 5 steps to achieve your dream career. Carry out each step to get moving for a successful career change.
