Are you happy with your job? Or have you considered shifting out of your career? 30% of Filipinos are dissatisfied with their jobs, while over half are considering a career shift.
If you’re considering changing careers, it’s normal to have doubts. Though it may seem like you’re starting from scratch, that isn’t necessarily true. And if you are, it shouldn’t stop you from going after something better than what you have today.
Below is a detailed guide on how to make a career shift successfully!
- Reflect On Your Reasons
Shifting careers is not a walk in the park. Before making this huge decision, you should take the time to reflect on why you want a career shift. After all, why switch careers if you can avoid it?
Ask yourself. Is it a salary issue? Are you unhappy with your job? Are there no career advancement opportunities? Do you want to gain new skills and experiences?
Whether your reason falls into any of these or not, it’s important for you to be aware because this helps determine whether you should really shift out of your career. Reasons like work-life balance, salary, or career advancements may not necessarily require changing your career; sometimes, a simple job switch will do.
It’s important to ask yourself, is there anything you can do about the problem? Could you negotiate a raise, ask your boss for more flexibility, or gain skills and knowledge outside to improve your chances of getting a promotion?
But if the answer is a hard ‘no’, then that’s the time to proceed to the next steps below.
- Assess Your Current Role
The primary reason you’re even considering a shift has to do with your current role. If you’re determined to change careers, it’s important to assess your role at the moment and identify the factors you don’t like or wish to change.
These details will help you know your non-negotiables, so you can set new career goals and have better direction when it comes to searching for your next role.
- Consider Your Options
So you’re ready to switch careers and you know what you want out of your next career. What follows is finding a new career path, whether that’s a totally different job and line of work or switching industries.
Though these seem daunting, they can also be rewarding. If your current career path isn’t cutting it for you anymore, then it’s high time you do something about it and look elsewhere. Not sure where to start? Some job portals like Bossjob have integrated AI features that match your skills and preferences to potential roles, making it much easier to shortlist those that fit your requirements best.
- Learn About Your Job Prospects
Once you’re clear on the kinds of roles you want and in which industries, it’s time to look at what’s actually out there. Look at job portals; choose ones that have a huge catalog of open positions in various industries like Bossjob with over 10,000 hiring companies to give yourself more options.
During this stage, it’s important to do a reality check. Are your wants realistic? Are there companies offering the things you want?
Sometimes, the things we want aren’t necessarily being offered and if we continue down the path of insisting we get these in our next role, we’re likely to find ourselves disappointed and without a job offer.
On the contrary, we may find what we want, however, we may not be qualified for them. Regardless, it helps to pinpoint the roles you want and pay extra attention to what it takes to get accepted for these roles.
- Chart A New Career Plan
With your target goals and industries identified, the next step is developing a plan on how you’re going to get into your target job and industry. For this activity, it’s good to set SMART goals that will help you develop actionable steps and provide a timeline for your career shift.
Having a career plan helps you gauge your readiness to make a career shift. It tells you whether you should do it gradually so you don’t end up unexpectedly unemployed for a prolonged period of time, or you can do it immediately, switching to a new job or industry.
- Gain Skills And Experience
There are no shortcuts when it comes to switching careers. If you want to get into a different role or you want to enter another industry, you need to meet the requirements. While you can have transferable skills, if you’re going to be new to the role, chances are you still need new skills and experience to make a successful career shift.
This can mean getting training and experience, whether that entails getting a degree, taking courses, doing an internship, freelancing, or volunteering.
And if you wish to go down this route, you must learn to budget your time and prioritize. Most people planning for a career shift are building new skills and gaining new experience on top of their current jobs. While this strategy ensures they don’t lose income while they prepare to switch jobs, it can also lead to burn out.
- Rebrand Yourself
When it comes to navigating the job market, you’re ultimately selling yourself to recruiters and employers through your resume, cover letters, and profiles on job portals. To get accepted into a new role or industry, you must present yourself differently from before in order to appeal to employers.
This involves repackaging your transferable skills, adding new skills and experiences to your CV, changing your personal statement, and adjusting your cover letter to suit a different role.
While this task can be grueling to do manually, in the advent of AI, some job portals like Bossjob now have AI-powered CV builders to help you create professional and curated resume that helps you stand out in the job market.
- Apply To Jobs And Attend Interviews
With a rebranded you, it’s time to apply to jobs and attend interviews. As a career shifter, you need every help you can get, and one way to do that is by getting a foot in through a contact. Companies tend to prioritize employee referrals over direct applications, hence, it helps to have a friend vouch for your skills and experience in order to get a job interview.
This aside, job application is also a numbers game. But this doesn’t mean you should apply to each and every job. To help you narrow down the roles you should apply for, use filters on job portals to target particular roles, industries, salary range, and even work set up.
With job boards becoming more nuanced and offering new features such as chatting directly with “bosses”, you can fast-track the decision making process and avoid getting “ghosted” during your job search.
Shifting careers seems like an intimidating journey. But with easy to use job portals like Bossjob, the process can be less stressful. With hundreds of job openings posted at any given time, you can filter for the roles that fit your requirements. Think you’re ready for to make a career shift? Visit Bossjob today!
