It’s Hard to Switch Careers without Taking a Step Back
Straight Truth series
Breaking into a new industry or role while keeping (or increasing) your level and pay is everyone’s dream.
Our reader question comes from Amir Satvat on behalf of the Video Games community.
He is commonly asked, “I want to get into games/media and I’ve tried everything but I’m stuck.”
Whenever you seek a new job, the hiring manager has 3 main questions:
Can you actually do the work? Do you have the skill and ability?
Will you work hard / reliably / intelligently?
Will you fit in / get along with others?
For each question, the people interviewing you assess a level of risk around you and other candidates. When you change jobs or industries, this increases the risk around question #1, can you actually do the work?
The most obvious proof you can “do the work,” for example in Video Game Development, is that you have built successful video games before. Career pivots involve how to get the job when you do not have this proof available.
To pivot a career, you need to either reduce the perceived risk that the hiring manager is taking or you need to find someone willing to take an increased risk, or both.
How to execute a career pivot with minimal pain.
It is easier to move to a new career inside your existing workplace. That is because questions 2 and 3 are already answered. At your current job, they have proof that you will work hard and that you fit in. This makes gambling on your ability to do something new much smaller because I am only taking a risk on one thing out of three. Internal transitions are easier for this reason.
Work for someone who already knows you. In this case, a manager who has worked with you in the past may trust you on questions 2 and 3, and may believe you can learn the new skills. This is the Networking approach to transition. I also wrote about how to find a great manager.
Take a more modest role. Reduce the hiring manager’s risk by acknowledging that you lack proven skills in the new role. You offer a high-value tradeoff of “you get someone who is a proven high-level worker in another field at a discount price.” This is the “lateral move” or “step back” approach. The goal is to get your foot in the door.
Find someone willing to take a bigger risk on you. Small companies are more likely to take risks than large companies. You may be able to find a hybrid job. You get hired to mainly do whatever was your old skill, but you can also try your hand at some of the new role. Large companies tend to have set roles; startups tend to have more flexible roles.
3 important things to note.
Build a trusted network. You will notice that most of the easy paths involve using your network. The first thing you may need to do is to start working on your network and getting to know people in your target industry.
How to build a strong network is one of the most common questions I get, as a result, I created a Leadership Networking on-demand course that teaches you the specific steps to build a personal brand, what makes leadership networking different, how to internally network, and how to get the 80% of leadership jobs that are never publicly posted.
A bad economy is a hard time to pivot. As a hiring manager, I have less motive to take a risk on you when there are many people with proven skills available. You may need to be patient and wait for better times or work extra hard on the networking to get around this. I wrote about the complications of changing career paths in a recession.
Education. Show your skills by taking classes, volunteering, and/or getting involved in your target industry. Amir Satvat is our poster child. He is a huge figure in the space of games and gaming advocacy, showing himself to have encyclopedic knowledge of games and game makers, and becoming a LinkedIn Top Voice. That kind of knowledge impresses.
If you’ve been laid off, I shared advice on how to best explain that you were laid off in an interview.
If you found this advice helpful, please consider sharing it.
Audience Insights
I have consolidated additional ideas worth considering from my LinkedIn audience, including:
There are many reasons it is hard to step back to a more modest role, including:
Ego. We all have it.
Pay. Most of us live at the edge of what we make. You cannot step back if you cannot get the economic space to do so.
Fear. The lingering question of “Will I ever get back to that level of pay and position?” The key thing to note is if you end up doing something you love, you will put in more work with more joy and tend to excel in delivering results.
Another “proof of work” method is build a game in your spare time (the side hustle). This signals you can do the work (reduces risk #1), your motivation, broadens your network, and gives you first-hand experience on the pain points and lessons learned to go in-depth in interviews.
A babystep pivot is to pick up a sub-specialization. For example, if you are a marketer wanting to move into cloud analytics, a babystep is to move into a marketing analytics role first, and then transition into the cloud industry.
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Straight Truth is a series where I take people’s hard questions and answer them in as direct a manner as possible, cutting through the polite fiction of larger workplaces. Jobs and careers are not as “fair” as we hope. I cannot give you justice at work, I can give you the truth as I see it.
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