Knowing Your Worth: The Changing Careers Edition

We’ve heard it a bunch of times- the workplace is changing more quickly these days than at any point in history.

Tons of articles about the “Future of Work” are readily available on the internet. “Will robots be doing all of our jobs in a few years?”

You get my drift- things are a-changin’.

So as a result, as industries crop up, disappear or consolidate, some of us are choosing to change careers, but get stuck on a major point: how to translate skills, projects and competencies from the current career to be applicable to the future career.

Several of my clients are working through this now, and I’ve created quite a few exercises for them to try out and see what sticks (because, in fact, we are not robots and all learn and process differently). I’ll share one such approach here, in the hopes that It helps you translate your experience and know your worth for a brand spankin’ new career.

The Distilling It Down Approach

1. Ok, don’t try to think about your resume and what you’ve done as a whole and try to immediately connect the dots to a new field. You may spontaneously combust, as one client told me they almost did before trying this approach!
2. Choose one project you’ve been an integral part of and/or one you’ve spearheaded. (For the following examples, imagine that you don’t want to work in these fields or functions anymore.) Maybe you’re an event planner who put an event together from inception to execution. Or maybe you work at a large bank and you put together the sustainability report for your company’s energy usage.
3. Talk it out. Yes, talk, not write for this particular approach. Either record yourself or work with your coach, mentor or friend to have them capture what you say (preferred as you want to end up with written notes and/or a transcription.)
4. Pull out the core skills needed to perform the tasks involved with the project. Make them industry agnostic. In the sustainability report example above, maybe you were collecting thousands of energy usage data points and calculating carbon emissions from those data points. That might translate into skills of “quantitative data collection” and “evaluating impact of what that data means for the business”.
5. Include those skills and any others as you go through the various major projects into a skills sheet of some kind. This will serve as the baseline for when you eventually start to look for roles in other fields, and you can more easily say, “Oh, I’ve done that….and that…and that…”

Because what tends to happen if you don’t do any exercise like this is that you’re unable to draw connections and similarities from what you’ve done to what you can do, thus making it more difficult to sell yourself in informational interviews, at events, in job applications and in actual interviews. Career changes often aren’t easy, so working through this very important step will give you insight, confidence and momentum to continue moving with your jump.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can stay on top of the changing economy, check out this insightful book by Anne Kreamer: Risk/Reward: Why Intelligent Leaps and Daring Choices are the Best Career Move You Can Make.

Want to learn more about understanding your worth at work? Join me on July 28 at noon EST for a special class on this very topic! Click here to attend.