5 Tips for Successful Career Change

Career Change – How do you feel about your career right now? Are you experiencing burnout? Remember the fire you once had at the beginning of your career?

You cannot wait to get up to go to work, to roll up your sleeves, to get things done, to create, to produce, to innovate.

That fire you once had, it’s gone. And now you show up at work. You’re not so sure why you’re even there.

And you wonder, and you ponder and you ask yourself –

• Is this what I want to be doing for the next two, three, or five, years?
• What’s the purpose of my life? 
• Where am I going?”

That void, that emptiness and you’re not so sure where that comes from.

And you’re not sure how to even fill that void but you know something is not working and something has to change. You’re thinking, should you change your career? But it’s scary, isn’t it? 

• What am I supposed to do?
• What if I go into a different industry,
• what if that doesn’t work?

Wouldn’t it be safe to just stay doing what I do but I don’t like what I do?

I want to do something else, I want to pursue a new career, I want a different environment, I want to work for a different company so how do you change career when you’re lost?

Now I don’t know you, I don’t know your situation, and I don’t know your background.

So all I can do is just share a little bit about my experience, what I have gone through in my career as an entrepreneur, some of the things that I’ve done, and some of the things that I’ve learned, and hopefully, that will serve you.

5 Tips for Successful Career Change

#1 Get Crystal Clear

The number one tip for a career change is to get crystal clear. I believe most people don’t get what they want in life it’s because they don’t know what they want in life.

Your success in life is largely determined by how clear you are with your vision. So what is your ideal lifestyle? What is it that you want to accomplish?

Maybe let’s say you want to travel the world, you want to see and you want to experience new things. 

Well, maybe working in an office and stuck in the same cubicle, that’s not what you want to do, that’s not where you want to be.

On the other hand, maybe you want to work with a lot of people, you want to connect.

Then working behind a computer, silo, on your own, being very lonely, that may not be your thing either right? 

So get crystal clear.

• What is your ideal lifestyle?
• What kind of house do you want to live in?
• What kind of car do you want to drive?
• Where do you want to travel?
• What kind of lifestyle do you want to provide for your family?
• How much money do you want to make? 

Income is important. Lifestyle is important, but income is important as well.

Let’s say you are making 5 Lakh a year and your goal is to make 20 Lakh a year.

You want to get to that six figure income level. Well, if you’re very honest, you can ask yourself and comment below. What are the chances of you getting to that 20 Lakh from 5 Lakh doing what you’re doing right now?

Be very, very honest. So if what you’re doing right now, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, is not gonna get you there then maybe it’s time to consider a career change.

To think about a different alternative, because if you want to go west, that’s where you want to go and you’re running east, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, that’s not gonna help.

#2 Indecision is a decision

Indecision is a decision that is tip two for a career change. Maybe the people around you in your life are telling you you should be happy with what you have, you should be content.

Like why are you taking unnecessary risks? Why do you want to change?

See human beings, we are creatures of habits. We don’t like to change.

The problem is, most people in life, they’re playing not to lose instead of playing to win.

So comment below, are you playing not to lose or are you playing to win?

If you are playing to win, it involves taking some risks. It involves stepping outside your comfort zone and doing something you’ve never done before.

Because here’s what I believe in. You think about our lifespan. Let’s say our average lifespan is 65 years. Maybe it’s 80 years, maybe it’s 90 years, doesn’t matter.

Let’s say we have 65 years on this planet earth. Well first of all, the first 18 years of your life, you’re learning how to walk, how to talk, you’re living under your parents’ roof.

You don’t make a lot of decisions on your own. You’re going to school, you’re learning a language, you’re learning how to be an adult going from a baby to a kid, to a kid, to a teenager, from a teenager to an adult, the first 18 years. Now that’s gone.

One-third of your life is spent on sleeping. We need to sleep, so one-third of that is gone. Now one third of your life is wasted on entertainment, commuting and a lot of different things day to day. Laundry, watching a movie, watching TV. Wasting time on social media.

That’s one third, it’s gone. So if you think about it, whatever is left, you have maybe 10,12, 13 years that you could invest in to create the life that you want.

Now that’s assuming if you don’t make any mistakes. If you actually make any mistakes, meaning maybe you’ve lost some money in business or whatever that you want to do, even just to pay off the student loan that you’ve accumulated, that takes a few years.

You’ve got very less time to create your ideal life. That’s not a lot of time.

So by not deciding to make a career change, you are deciding because your indecision is a decision.

You have chosen, you have decided to stay at the same spot and not do anything about it and the time gets shorter, and shorter, and shorter.

You see in life, we all suffer from two forms of pain. Either the pain of regret or the pain of discipline. Well the problem is the pain of discipline weighs ounces and the pain of regret weighs tons.

You’ve got to pick one of these two. Which one?

Indecision is a decision.

#3 Who you work for is more important

Tip three for a career change is Who you work for is more important than what company you work for. You see, you want to pick someone, a leader, a visionary, a CEO that you trust, that you look up to, that you respect, that you can learn from.

It’s very, very critical. You see most people, they think that while I want to work for a big-name company with the best benefits and vacation pay, and all that stuff, that’s not the most important.

It’s way more beneficial for your long-term career when you can pick a leader that will teach you, that will coach you, will nurture you, that will give you skillsets, that will give you opportunities because those opportunities or whatever knowledge that you gain, you take it with you. No one can take that away.

I was working in MNC, a big name but it was poor leaders. In my case, it was the reverse instead of my boss teaching me I have to educate and coach the boss. That was one of the reasons why I opted for a career change.

Imagine if you have the opportunity to go back and work for Bill Gates and Jack Ma, and Steve Jobs.

What would that be like? Finding that visionary, which is very, very rare, very, very rare.

Sometimes when you work for a big company, a big name, a lot of those structures are already built. 

There are not a lot of opportunities left but most people they suffer from shortsighted thinking. 

All they think about is, well how much am I getting paid? What’s my hourly rate? What’s gonna be my vacation pay?

All these things, here’s the secret. Pick a high-growth company with world-class visionary leaders.

If you could do that, there would be so many opportunities for you, for growth, for promotions, and also for leadership positions.

When you pick a world-class, hyper-growth company that’s like this, with a world-class visionary, a true leader who sees where he wants to be and is getting it, and is going there, that person, if you work within that organization, that’s what you want to do and you will learn so much more.

It doesn’t matter in the future whatever you want to pursue. That experience will be invaluable.

#4 Skills Over Degree

Tip number four is the most important tip of all and that is skills over degrees.

Most people think that in order to have more success they need to go back to school and get a second degree or get an MBA, even though the first degree didn’t get what they want.

They’re not experiencing the success that they want in the first place.

When is more the solution of not enough? That’s not the point.

You need to think about okay, maybe it’s not just a degree, that piece of paper. Skills are more important.

Nowadays, companies are looking for skills. They hire skills, not just that piece of paper, that degree. That know that is not enough, that is a lot of time. 

Just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you have common sense and it doesn’t mean you have skills. See, degree only means that you know something. You passed these exams.

You have done these courses, that’s all it means. Skills on the other hand, means not just you know something, it means you can do something, meaning that you have the ability, the capabilities to produce a certain result.

Depends on what kind of skillsets do you have. And skills are transferable. It’s not limited to just one industry and one company.

So whatever skills that you have developed, you can transfer it to other industries if you want to and companies are always willing to pay a premium for that.

And that gives you true peace of mind, that gives you true security, does that make sense? 

#5 Taste the Water with Side Project

Tip five is before doing an actual career change if you have fear, what I want you to do is taste the water with a side project. This means starting something on your own part-time. 

This is what I have done. I have started developing my skills part-time by doing blogging, youtube, and digital marketing part-time, and when I felt that now it is time for a career change I switched to my new career in digital marketing.

Let’s say you’re trying to break into front-end web development. Once you’ve picked up the requisite skills, you can come up with a side project idea to show off what you’ve learned. That might mean creating a personal website or using Bootstrap to create a landing page for a product. 

Creating side projects can be a useful practice in many ways when making a career change. It helps you understand what hands-on work in a new industry looks like, gives you something to put on your portfolio, and is something that recruiters can look at to gauge your skills. 

Over to You

I hope you have got a complete understanding of career change and you must have also got clarity on when to do a career change. If you are still confused reach me at sk@moneyexcel.com and I will surely help you out.