Career Change is a Retrain Required?

Many people assume that to change career they are going to have to completely retrain.

Not true. Yes, it applies to some careers but for the majority it doesn’t.  Careers that require professional registration will require a complete retrain i.e. social worker to doctor, nurse to health and safety officer.

So, what role do you want to move into?  You will already know if you have to complete mandatory training or are you looking for a career change that may not require specific qualifications in order for you to obtain it?

You may just need to find a way through the door.

If it’s latter it may not be a question of retraining but re-branding you and your skills, knowledge and experience.  Many people know about transferable skills and prior knowledge/learning yet are unable to utilise them in their search and application.

The following might help and it’s good fun:

Send off for three applications for the job/career you are aiming for.  This can be based anywhere because at this point you are probably not going to apply right away, so forget saying ‘oh I am not skilled’ this way you are taking the emotion all out of it.

You have no intention of applying.

Once they come, go straight to the person specifications and we will use these only.

Look for the similarities, they may be worded differently but do they mean the same thing?

Create your own specification called ‘My Dream Job Requirements’ on a new piece of paper.

List everything you need to have in order to be doing the job.

Now, for every point on your list write beside it examples, truths, knowledge, paid, unpaid experience, why you know you could do the task.

Recently, I worked with a client who had been working in retail for 20 years and they wanted a role helping people but they felt they had no experience.

Doing the above exercise we discovered together that she had brought three children up on her own, cared for a parent who had died of cancer, volunteered in a day centre ‘doing peoples nails’ and was involved in a local community group.

Their problem was, they did not see the connection. You can right?

So you will have two lists next, where are the gaps?  That is your first retraining.  It might be something like ‘ability to use SAGE’.  Your call to action would be identify who uses this, where they use it, can you help them use it?

This may even be someone you know.  And note it where it says the ‘ability’ to use, not 10 years experience.  If you are asked for an ability to do something, you can probably assume they will provide training.  You just need to show you have the capability to learn.

People assume they have to spend fortunes in expensive career change retraining yet someone else out there already knows what they need to know.

The key is learn and retrain from them.