PM Your Life - Career Transition
Moving from one career to another is a cause for preparation and celebration. I’ve been steadily working since high school and these nearly 20 years of work have taught me that I am resilient, flexible, creative and a great fit to almost any team. All that notwithstanding, let’s get to the point. How to make a career transition as beneficial to all interested parties as possible. Three specific questions have to be answered. The rest of this text will be focused on identifying the answers.
What do you want?
What do they want?
Transformation/Presentation
1. What do you want
This part is all about you. What do you want from your next gig? Write it down. Include non-salary benefits as well as a goal salary. This entire exercise is intended to make your life better so be sure to include all the things that support that goal. The goal is to write down your pie-in-the-sky goals and calculate what the cost of living is for that goal. A great resource is the Rebrand Expense Calculator. Copy it to your own Google Drive or download as an Excel file and fill it in. Additionally, what do you want your work life to look like? Do you want to work on a team or independently? On-site or remotely? How much travel would you prefer? Do you want to work the night shift? 6am-3pm? Only four days a week? Whatever is important to you-- write it down.
Now that you know what you want for your life it is time to find roles that work for you. Research job titles, salaries, companies in the area you want to work in or companies that hire remote workers (whatever is appropriate for you). Make a list of the titles and the companies. There are literally millions of jobs available but at any given time a person is only looking for one or two. Once you know what you want you will be able to eliminate millions of options and make it that much easier to figure out what they want and how to get there.
2. What do they want?
“They”, in this instance, is the employers in your field of choice. It’s a pretty simple question to answer because they tell you exactly what they are looking for via job postings. Look at job posts of the job title you want and start taking notes of what is required and what is preferred. Additionally, look at adjacent roles, roles with similar names, roles that are the next steps (e.g. if you are seeking an associate role, also look at the senior roles) and take notes there. Write it down or print it out or make a document in your word processor of choice. As you continue to study the roles, the requirements, and the companies you will see patterns develop. Make notes of the patterns you see. Save the job descriptions as PDFs so you can refer to them later.
3. Transformation/Presentation
This part will only be possible once the first two sections are done. Section A “What do you want” was about you figuring out who you are and what you want. That information was then used to search for specific roles, at specific companies, in specific locations. By now you should have an idea of the jobs you are most interested in applying for and a decent collection of what these roles require.
Transformation.
First things first, do you need to get any certifications? Are there skills you need to obtain to become the best version of you for your ideal role? If you want to be, for example, a System Administrator for Acme Downtown Company and they use ServiceNow-- are you familiar with ServiceNow? Do you have any of the affiliated certifications? If you want to be a developer for Miscellaneous Corporation-- do you know or have a familiarity with the programming languages they use? Figure out if you have any skill gaps and FILL THEM! This is why you save the job posts as PDFs.
Presentation.
Update your resume and any web presence you may need to get the job. Use the job descriptions to create your resume. If you’re applying via a computer system you’ll want to be sure to include the language the employers use to describe your relevant accomplishments. Do research on how to optimize your resume for an ATS (applicant tracking system) and follow the guidance. Hire a professional resume writer if you need to and are able to do so. Also make sure to refine your resume for each role at each company. Lastly, save each resume you submit. “Lastname - Company - Role.rtf” is a great format so you can refer to the same resume you submitted when you are contacted for an interview.
This whole process should also increase your confidence in your ability to do the job as well as your excitement-- both of which are a good thing to interviewers. You will have done research on yourself, the role, the company and ensured that not only do you know what you want now but you also have information about the career path. Other sources have a lot of information about how to excel at interviews so I’ll leave them to it. Good luck and let me know how this information was useful for you.