Construction Labour

Making a Mid-Stream Career Change

It's a pretty tough ask to expect young school leavers to nail down a career choice at age 18 and stick to it throughout their adult years. A plethora of options and a lack of real world experience lead many to make decisions that later turn out to be less than ideal for their adult lives.

The good news is that it actually matters very little what crazy choices we make for ourselves as teenagers. So what if when you were 17 you tried to become a supermodel, refused to go to college because you were going to become a musician, went to art school and convinced yourself it was a calling or enrolled in an entirely sensible college course that turned out to be completely uninspiring: none of it matters. Career change is possible at any juncture along the way.

The modern working environment calls for a flexible and adaptable approach; the days of signing on to a job as a young person and staying in that workplace until retirement are virtually over. A group of the working community who are already advanced in their careers will still experience this old model and receive the obligatory 'gold watch', but young workers cannot sit back and expect a workplace to take care of them. This lack of certainly should be seen in its proper aspect as a huge opportunity to market oneself and grow and change throughout a lifetime.

Careers are not fixed entities any longer, and it truly is the case that every new twist is taking you one step closer to the person you are becoming. We can use a celebrity example here to remind ourselves that as one door closes, another definitely opens.

Tyra Banks
Discovered as a model at a young age and plunged into superstardom early in her life, Tyra seemed to have a dream career. Modeling, however, is not a long-lived enterprise and savvy Ms Banks put on her business hat and created a top-rating television series after concluding her time as a Victoria's Secret model. Tyra has now reinvented herself as a television talk show host.

Tyra is a great example of personal career management, because although most of us aren't transitioning from a modeling career (we're more likely to be factory workers, lawyers, retail service assistants or trades people) we can see that Tyra took one phase and used it in her move to something entirely different. Television production is only related to modeling in the most tenuous way; but being a smart cookie, Tyra was able to use what she knew (how to become a successful model) in order to get to this next stage of her career. From this success, she was able to leave modeling subject matter behind and become a talk show host.

How can you make a real-world career change?
Taking stock of where you are now, you can use the knowledge and experience you have gained to help you move to the next phase of your career. We can take the unfortunate example of losing one's job; being fired for any reason, even if it's a retrenchment rather than poor performance, is demoralising and feels like the end of the world. It's actually an opportunity in disguise.

Imagining that the job you had was in graphic design, you could consider freelancing instead and potentially could find yourself with a booming business three years on. Or maybe you never liked graphics that much anyway, consider what else you might prefer and find a way to use your design knowledge to help you get there.

Sometimes you need to retrain
It isn't always so smooth. If the designer used in our example decides that he or she wants to become a fire fighter... leveraging the ability to make things look pretty on the page is probably not going to help. This will require them to retrain.

Starting from scratch can be scary, but you aren't ever really starting from scratch - it just feels that way. When you began your first career, you had no life experience to guide you, but now you do. Life experience is what's going to help you make the adjustment and learn how to perform your new role much faster than when you first started out in the workforce.

A positive attitude
Really all it takes to adjust to a career change is an optimistic outlook and a capacity to embrace change as an opportunity. Twenty-first century employment is all about flexibility and self management, you need to remember that you are captaining your career ship, and it can sail wherever you choose.