How To Change Careers

You are brave, if you are considering leaving your career. Most people make themselves stay at jobs or careers they hate because they are afraid of the unknown.

However, knowing the difference between leaving a job and leaving a career can make your transition smooth and easy or painful to say the least.

You change careers when you are in the wrong profession or you are in a career that you’re not suited for. And, you do not change careers simply because you are unhappy at work!

Change your careers by first facing the reasons why you’re leaving, identifying the kind of work you are suited for and following through with a career transitioning plan.

The rest of this article presents 5 easy steps for changing your career:

1. Do you like your job?Be honest about the reasons why you’re leaving your current employment.

   Is it because you have lost or never had passion for your work or is it because you are looking for a better pay?

   Are you changing careers because you hate your boss or employer or because you consistently get low performance appraisals at work?

2. Change careers for the right reasons: Some of the issues you face at one job are likely to show up at other jobs.

   For example, if you are a business analyst who hates talking to senior management and you change to another business analyst job, you may find yourself facing the same issue again.

   However, if your issues are specific to your current boss or employer and you can’t resolve them … then changing jobs and not your entire career may help.

   For example, I once interviewed for a job and I asked the team lead the question: “how do you to communicate to a team member that, he or she is not doing a good job?“

   To which the team lead replied saying that he simply YELLS and SHOUTS at anyone who is not meeting his expectations.

   My reaction was simply to turn down their employment offer, since I could see that the team had management or personnel issues peculiar to them.

3. Take an inventory of your skills, interests, abilities, educational background and experience: If you have worked for at least a year, you already know a lot about yourself.

   So, start by taking an inventory of your personal abilities, strengths and aptitudes.

   • Do you like putting together a lot of technical documentation?

   • Do you like make presentations to team members, stakeholders or management?

   • Are you accustomed to and do you use a lot of SQL queries at work?

   • Do you like working on customer support issues?

   • Do you like writing small code snippets to fix buggy software products?

   It is important that you itemize all the skills and abilities you’ve used over your working life so you can get a better picture of what you are wired do.

4. Explore alternatives career paths before choosing: One of the issues facing IT professionals comes from having little to no knowledge of the career alternatives available to them.

   Simply said, there are a number of good IT career alternatives out there and there is no one career that is better for everyone.

   Some of the IT careers with good prospects include:
   

   • technical recruiting

   • pre-sales support

   • technical writing

   • software architecture

   • database development

   • software development

   • report writing

   • web analytics

   • customer relationship management

   • business analysis

   • project management

   • business intelligence

   Before deciding what career best suits you, first prepare the comprehensive skills evaluation mentioned in the last point.

5. Get hands-on experience outside work; Don’t be expecting to get a job without strong hands-in experience because that is like gambling with your time.

   You need to first improve your skills and hands-on experience while working on your resume.

   Determine exactly, how you will get the training, skills and hands-on experience required for each career you are interested in.

   Don’t be a professional whose effort at getting a job consists only of rewriting resumes to match job descriptions.

Remember, the IT Job Market is a numbers game that plays in your favor like a rigged lottery if you have the right skills, experience and background and not just a souped up resume!

Okay, we are interested in answering questions on how to change careers … to get yours answered,, just post it below as a comment!

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