So that’s it you’ve done a lot of soul searching, created a vision for the future, done your research and have picked your dream career. Congratulations! Sometimes deciding what to do can be the hardest part of a career change.
But what if you don’t have any experience in that field?
Hardly surprising as it’s a brand-new career.
But you have bucket loads of passion and enthusiasm. If only you could get employers to look past the lack of directly relevant experience on your resume and see that. If only you could get them to take a chance on you.
I’m not going to lie to you this is a challenge. But it’s not insurmountable. Think of all the people you know who have switched careers. In fact, you wouldn’t be reading this blog post if yours truly hadn’t overcome that challenge.
So what do you do?
Get experience
Hang on you’re thinking, that’s what I’m trying to do but because I haven’t worked in this area before employers won’t give me a chance. I’m in a catch-22 situation, haven’t you been listening?
Yes, but there is more than one way to get experience. It’s going to require some effort on your part but you’ll be learning along the way and it’s got to be better than sending off hundreds of resumes and getting no response.
Volunteer
Volunteering is not just for those who want to work for the United Nations, there are lots of ways to volunteer and gain experience and skills relevant to all sectors. Say you want to work in marketing or events, well there are lots of charities that need help in those areas. Perhaps you want to work in finance, then volunteering as treasurer for the school P&C could be great experience. Check out Go Volunteer to search for volunteering opportunities in your area or just use your imagination and contact organisations that you think would be a good fit.
Stretch your current job
Think about how you could stretch your current role to help you build the skills and experience you need. Perhaps you can take on a new project in that area or volunteer for a committee at work that helps you develop your new interest. You may even be able to spend some time in, or transfer permanently to, another department that is more relevant to your ideal career. For example if you’d like to work in personal development then could moving into the HR or Training department help you?
Preserve constancy as well as change
This is linked to the above point, sometimes it’s easier to start your career change within your current organisation if the structure allows it. For example, say you want to coach professional athletes who are retiring and need to build new career skills and you’re currently a sales manager for a large corporate. You could begin this shift by getting your current organisation to pay for a coaching qualification which you utilise by coaching individuals within your organisation, you may even be able to move into an internal coaching role. This gets you some coaching experience. That combined with weekend sports involvement may be enough to get an employer in this area to take a chance on you.
The alternative approach with the example just given is that you could take your sales experience and seek to get a role within sales for a major sports club or association. Once you’re in there you could try to get to know the coaches who work with athletes and then do a coaching qualification before convincing the head coach to give you a try.
In either case, you have preserved some constancy whilst changing. This makes for an easier shift and is rule #2 of the Seven Rules for Career Change in What Colour is Your Parachute? (the world’s best selling jobhunting book).
The key here is being flexible. Once you’ve made the first shift you are closer to your end goal.
Start a side hustle
Starting a side hustle in your own time is the perfect way to develop skills and experience in your new career. This is what I did alongside my former career when I first started coaching. The opportunities here are endless. If you want to be a graphic designer then set up a basic website and start taking on jobs for friends or for local small businesses. You can advertise your services on Upwork or some of the other freelancer websites. Sometimes your side hustle will become a full time business that replaces your previous career or sometimes it is a stepping stone into employment.
Study
Sometimes study is a necessary part of a career change if your career change requires certain qualifications for accreditation purposes. Other times study will help you develop useful knowledge, contacts, skills and demonstrate commitment to your new career. For more on this read my previous blog post on the benefits of studying if you’re changing career.
Do some casual work
Finally, if you have some flexibility in your schedule, you could consider doing casual work in your new career or in an area that is closely related to it. Employers are more willing to take a chance on someone without relevant experience, but a good attitude, if they are not tied into anything. And likewise, this gives you an opportunity to try a new career before you buy it, so to speak. Contact organisations that you would like to work for directly and see if they have opportunities (but not before you’ve read what I have to say below).
Be creative and have confidence
So, you’re committed to getting experience by any means necessary. You’re on your way.
But the other important thing is to be able to tell your story. This is partly about owning the skills, experience and attributes you have and how they make you fantastically suited to this new career. The other part is being able to tell that story to the right people, who want what you have to offer.
How do you do that?
Find people not jobs
Instead of spending hours on job boards, feeling despondent when role after role asks for two years prior experience, how about you invest that time in finding people who are doing the work that you’d like to do and building a relationship with them?
This is called information interviewing and is exactly what I did when I was changing career (another term is meeting people for coffee). It’s not as hard as you think if you’re willing to ask for some help, do some searching on LinkedIn and receive a few rejection emails.
What this allows you to do is tell your story in a no pressure environment because there’s no job on offer. You simply get to learn about your ideal career, express your enthusiasm for it and tell the person you’re meeting with about how you’re perfect for it (but you just can’t get a break). They may be able to give you some tips or refer you to someone else that can help. Or you might just build a relationship with them that could lead to an opportunity in the future.
Act as if you’re already in that career
This is a little bit fake it till you make it but bear with me. What I’m asking you to do is picture somebody who is in your ideal career. What do they read or subscribe to? What events do they go to? What professional associations are they a member of? What professional development do they undertake? And then I want you to do the same. This will expose you to people working in that career allowing you to build your network (see above) but will also help you to learn the terminology of that industry. Believe me different industries have their own language and you want to be talking it. If your name crops up enough or you meet enough of the same people at events, very soon you will be seen as part of the in-crowd and develop credibility. This also does wonders for your confidence.
Rework your resume and LinkedIn
Despite everything I’ve said about meeting people, your resume and LinkedIn are still necessary but hopefully you’ll be getting them in front of the right people who already know something about you and what you have to offer.
You may need to get a little creative with your resume. You could present a skills-based resume to employers instead of a standard jobs in chronological order resume. With this approach your headings are the skills that the employer is looking for and the bullet points are the achievements you’ve made in developing those skills. If that approach sounds a bit too wacky for you then another approach is to break your resume down into sections of Relevant Experience and Other Experience. This works if you have followed my points above and developed a little experience in the new career by volunteering or starting a side hustle. In your Other Experience section you need to be really targeted on the skills the employer is looking for and remove anything that is irrelevant. I offer a FREE resume review service if you would like more help with this.
It’s a job hunters’ market
Finally, have faith because it’s a job hunters market at the moment so this is a great time to be changing career. Due to a lack of available talent, employers are hiring candidates without directly relevant experience as long as they have excellent transferable skills and display a good attitude and willingness to learn. So now is your time.
Not sure what your transferable skills are? Or whether you have the skills an employer is after. You can download my skills audit template to help you assess your level of competency with the common skills employers are after. Better still, I’ve set this up as a word document so you can edit depending on the skills required in your new career.
Breaking into a new career, without relevant experience is hard but believe me when I say it is worth it. It may seem like an effort to get the experience and present it in a creative way but that is nowhere near as hard as putting up with a job that makes you unhappy when there is something better for you out there.
If you’d like to discuss your career change approach further then book in with me for a FREE Working Mum SOS. 30 minutes to strategise solutions to your biggest career change issues.