Time for a change?

Standing at a career crossroads can be daunting. Turn to the right and stay on the same career path or look to the left and embrace a new route? Stay in your comfort zone or leap into the unknown?

Whether redundancy and industry changes are influencing your thinking or you’re bored with your job and looking for a fresh start, making a career change is achievable if you focus on your transferable skills and add a dose of ambition and self-belief.

So, what are transferable skills? These are skills that are relevant across different industries and the expertise and abilities that you’ve acquired over time from your work or life experiences … through volunteering, hobbies or even parenting (negotiating with children taught me a lot of skills that I then transferred to the boardroom!).

Identifying your skills

Step one is a little self-reflection. An honest appraisal of what you’re awesome at.

There’s the obvious ones to begin with: people skills, teamwork, leadership, these are all great but you also need to identify the unique ones. The ones that will set you apart from other candidates.

• Soft skills will be the skills you use when dealing with people or communicating
• Hard skills will be the skills you use when working with technology, languages or using data

Examples include:

• Communication and account management
• Budget management and commercial acumen
• Business Development and networking
• Creativity and innovation
• Project management
• Research and analytical skills
• Problem solving
• Interviewing, training and onboarding
• Forecasting and predicting
• Cognitive flexibility – thinking outside the box

Translating your skills

Once you’ve identified the skills that you’d be top of the class for, it’s then a case of looking at how they’d translate into a different industry and how they could be advantageous to a future employer. Whilst you’re not a typical candidate you have skills that other candidates don’t and can bring fresh ideas and a new perspective into a team.

You need to think about how you can show your value to a hiring manager. A role will be vacant to fill a gap or need in the business - so which of your skills would fill that need and be of value. Could your skills in business development and cognitive flexibility make you a contender for an account management role? Could your problem solving and analytical skills mean a move into data is a real prospect?

If you've got it, flaunt it!

There may be candidates with more relevant experience applying for the job of your dreams, so you’re going to have to really nail your application and make it easy for the hiring manager/recruiter/HR to understand why you should be considered.

• Highlight your skills on your CV and make them easy to find and understood
• Try to avoid too much jargon from your current industry – a balance between showing you are experienced but also open to change
• Add in achievements that are tailored towards the skills you want to focus on
• Tailor your cover letter to every role and explain why you want to change roles and how your skills will be of value to them. Show that you’re unique and why that will benefit them.
• Review and update your LinkedIn profile – make sure that your transferable skills are evident
• Self belief - if you don't think you can make the move then you'll never convince anyone else!

Taking the turn to the left in your career crossroads isn’t always going to be the easy route but it can definitely be a rewarding one!