Do you trust yourself to get it right, this time?
Are you sure that when you decide on your next career path, you’ll have chosen well?
This was my biggest concern during my shift: I was terrified of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
What if I got it wrong again? What if I found a great-looking career, but discovered, once I’d already made the leap, that it wasn’t as great as it seemed?
If that’s a concern for you too, then the Testing and Validating stage of the map is your new best friend.
In this stage, you’re going to test out a range of career options related to your themes, so you can be certain (real-world certain, not in-your-head certain) that you’re in the right place in the end.
Once you’ve worked through the Focusing stage, you’ll probably have noticed that there are lots of roles or careers that relate to your career themes – lots of different ways you could work under the ‘banner’ of each one.
So now, your focus is on identifying which ones could really work for you in practical terms.
And the way we do that is the way we do everything in career change: through action.
Your task in this stage is to find ways to get as close to the coal-face of your different career options as possible, to find out what they’re really like on the inside.
- Toying with becoming a personal trainer? Recruit three friends for a tester session in the park one afternoon and see if it’s as fun as it looks.
- Thinking about moving into corporate social responsibility? Seek out a friendly CSR professional, and invite them for a coffee to find out more about the career progression opportunities.
- Curious about graphic design? Join a two-hour online workshop to see if it’s something you could learn without too much stress.
- Keen to get into social entrepreneurship? Go to a meetup or a conference and ask lots of questions about the different types of business-for-good you could move into.
- Wondering about the financial viability of your business idea? Create a mini-version of your product or service and see if people will pay for it.
In the double-diamond shape of the career change map, this stage is another expansion – we go wide again before we narrow down.
That broadening of the red lines represents you testing all kinds of different options within your themes – exploring a whole range of possibilities (and discarding a good chunk of them) before settling on a path forward that you know is right for you.
And discarding ideas through testing, disappointing though it may sound, is a vital part of the process.
Maybe you spend a day work-shadowing someone in the charity sector and discover there’s far more paperwork than the people-work you imagined.
Perhaps you talk to a PR officer and learnt that while the work is ultimately well-paid (just as you’d imagined), it takes a lot of late nights and being on-call 24/7 in the first few years to build the relationships you need to reach that income level – and your young family won’t fit that lifestyle right now.
Or maybe you finally take that decluttering service idea you’ve been thinking about for years, and offer it on your community’s social media page – and find out that while domestic decluttering is something a few people are interested in, most of them are asking if you offer digital decluttering… which you’d never considered before.
All those ‘mistaken’ ideas, assumptions, beliefs, career options – they’re incredibly valuable to you – because each one is a ‘wrong path’ you’re not going to go down.
Every option you cross off your list is one step closer to the right career for you.
Working thoroughly through the Testing and Validating stage of the career change map means that you will:
- Minimise the risk of making a wrong move and feel secure in the decisions you make, because they’re rooted in real-world experience, not assumptions
- Plan an effective, informed route forward without wasting time, energy or stress on unnecessary detours
- Develop valuable relationships and experience in new areas before you start applying for jobs
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“I dread to think where I’d be now if I hadn’t gone through the Testing and Validating process.
It would have been so easy for me to throw my savings into retraining as a dietician or going to school for interior design, both ideas I’d been thinking about for years.
The things I did to try those careers out opened my eyes to so much I hadn’t considered before.
And it was only by running experiments that I accidentally stumbled upon set design and met my current boss.”
– Sam, Career Change Launch Pad participant
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In our next and final e-mail of the Career Change Map series, I’ll be sharing three key principles for moving through the three stages in the swiftest, smoothest, most stress-free way.
Natasha
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Natasha
Head Coach, Careershifters