So what should you be when you grow up? Or perhaps, more accurately, now that you HAVE grown up?
No question about it, this is the hardest question I encounter in my coaching practice, since it’s a question that entails far more “gray area” than things like building resumes, teaching interviewing tips, or showing somebody how to network more effectively. When it comes to career direction, one has to take into consideration a vast array of factors that include income needs, benefits coverage issues, preferred geographic location, family dynamics, and work environment preferences. On top of this, when dealing with mid-career professionals, you usually also have to limit the options to those occupations somebody might have a legitimate shot at pursuing WITHOUT starting completely over from the ground up – or completing years of intensive, expensive training – since the majority of experienced professionals aren’t willing to drop back down to an entry-level wage or title in order to reinvent themselves.
Again, it’s a daunting challenge. And I’ve written a lot of articles about the career change issue in my blog here over the years, for those who might want to give these past publications a read.
As for how this issue has been approached historically, there has been a sea of books written over the years on how to pull off a successful career change, in addition to hundreds of “assessments” created to help people figure out their ideal path. Unfortunately, in my subjective opinion, the vast majority of these approaches are severely lacking. At best, they either just speak in high-level generalities (e.g. “follow your dreams”) without offering any practical or realistic advice for doing so — or they simply provide some pseudoscientific insights into one’s personality, a factor which has precious little (if any) correlation with what somebody should be doing for a living.
Not all accountants are introverts, in other words, and not all salespeople are born knowing how to work a room.
So where does that leave us? Interestingly, amongst the wide array of lackluster tools out there for assessing career direction, there are several new offerings that I think represent a major step forward in the evolution of the field. Essentially, these new “Career Change 2.0” tools scan your existing career documents (such as your resume) and then use data science to compare your career data with the information from millions of other people — looking for other individuals, working in different fields, who seem to have similar skills, strengths, and qualifications to your own.
One such tool that I’ve blogged about previously is JobScan’s Career Change Tool, which you can read more about here, if interested. Along those same lines, however, LinkedIn has recently unveiled a new Career Exploration application that I think has great potential. The site allows you to type in the name of any job role you’ve held to date, then it will suggest the other career paths (drawn from millions of other real-world LinkedIn users) that have some sort of connection to the skills you’ve utilized to date.
If you say that you’re a Technical Writer, for example, it will suggest careers as a Technical Publications Manager, Documentation Manager, or Information Developer. If instead you state that you’re currently working as a Real Estate Agent, it will inform you that the roles of Loan Originator, Property Management Specialist, or Home Inspector have the strongest correlation with your work history to date.
Now I know what you’re thinking – where’s the magic in that? Aren’t such roles somewhat obvious, as choices, to people working in these fields? Ah, but that’s the critical thing. In the real world, especially for somebody who doesn’t want to take a massive pay cut or reinvent themselves from scratch, these sorts of semi-obvious roles truly reflect a person’s best choices. It’s no accident, in other words, that many former teachers go on to become corporate trainers. Or former police officers become corporate security professionals. Or veteran journalists end up in roles as PR consultants or public information officers. These are the natural, time-tested job tangents that would take most advantage of such a person’s skill sets – and therefore reflect the options offering the best marketability and salary prospects.
Make no mistake, however, if you spend enough time running searches on this new LinkedIn tool, you’ll inevitably come across some career options you HAVEN’T heard of – and better yet, will be able to review specific data around the number of such jobs that exist in the new field, the degree of skill correlation with your background, and the gaps that one might need to address to make the switch.
So is this new tool perfect? No, far from it. But again, compared to the vast array of “static” career tools and sites that have wasted peoples’ time to date, I think LinkedIn’s approach has a ton of potential. It’s not only infused with a healthy dose of market reality, but also analyzes occupational data in real-time, versus being based on government data that could be as much as a decade old. Give it a look!
