Five Essential Rules for Changing Careers

Today we’ll be discussing how to change your career successfully with Fast Company editors Kate Davis and Anisa Purbasari Horton, hosts of the Secrets of the Most Productive People podcast.

When you change careers, it's a leap of faith. Sometimes, it's like cliff diving—it's a terrifying leap from a tall cliff, but you quickly catch an updraft and soar. Sometimes, it's a leap from the municipal pool high dive. You do a belly flop into the pool and someone posts the video on Instagram, where it goes viral and gets 15 million humiliating shares. 

But with a little preparation and groundwork, you can stick the landing and increase your chances for a successful career change.

Think of yourself as skills, not jobs

We’re taught to think of ourselves in terms of our job title. But when you’re changing careers, people in your new field may not even recognize job titles from your old one. Even if your new field has roles with the same title, the actual definition of those roles could be very different. A producer in the film industry does very different work than a theater producer does. Both roles are in the entertainment industry, but you can't count on them needing the same skills or involving the same responsibilities.

When you’re preparing to explain yourself to prospective employers, to explain yourself in terms of:

• The skills you bring to the table
• The results you can achieve when you put those skills into action

Flaunt your credentials

If you have a college degree, professional certifications, or awards, let people know. While the specific credential may not be transferable, it can show that you’re capable of mastering and applying skills.

For example, let’s say you went through W. Edward Demings’s Quality College. It’s a course in how to improve quality in organizations. Even if you’ve never been an official process engineer, including that course on your resume signals that you’re comfortable with those concepts, and you can probably apply them to your new field.

Share your clips

Examples of your work are even better than commendations. Photographers, designers, and illustrators have portfolios that show off their work. Computer programmers have Github repositories where prospective employers can see real, live code samples. Reporters and other writers have clips of stories they’ve written. (Fun fact: They’re called “clips” because long ago, newspapers were printed on paper, and they would clip out the printed copies of the stories they wrote).

Think in terms of how to transfer the skills that underly your work samples to your new job.

Work...

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