Changing career direction is always an extremely difficult transition to navigate and is often fairly rare to see. Finding time and space to assess your skill set (and the transferrable skills you have) is even more challenging and is probably the main reason why not many people change direction in their career.
The difficulty is convincing the employer that you have the right skills to succeed in their role and organisation, but if you cannot assure yourself, what chance have you got to convince someone else?
Being coached is an excellent way to explore this area and to give you the time, space, and the right questioning to help explore what motivates you, what you are good at and what other roles you may be able to pursue with your transferrable skills. In this blog post I cover a few areas and tools that I have learnt through coaching that may be able to help you in this skills space.
Transferrable skills are important for changing careers because as the name suggests they are skills you can utilise from one career to the next. These can be things like (and not limited to) stakeholder management, technical software skills, knowledge of a particular market.
One area we often see transferrable skills used a lot is a transition from Location Planning to Consumer Insight and wider strategy roles. As a Location Planner you often build up an ability to take information and data and use that to provide insights to what a business needs to do – these are skills that, when you think about and analyse them, they can transfer to many other roles.
Coaching Tools and Phrases to Help With Transferrable Skills and Changing Careers
Career Timeline
This is a visualisation technique that allows the coachee to stop and think about major achievements along their career timeline. It helps to “dig out” key skills and deliverables that you have attained and achieved along the way (many that you actually forget about), which are incredibly valuable when you are thinking of changing career direction. This can also give you the space to really feel and explore what excited you in your past roles and I guarantee if you try it you will learn something new about yourself.
Limiting Beliefs
A limiting belief is a state of mind or belief about yourself that restricts you in some way. Limiting beliefs can hold you back when it comes to looking into a change in career. This aspect of coaching is heavily linked to the author Nancy Kline and her book a time to think. Nancy covers a lot about Incisive questions and these can help unlock these limiting beliefs and qualified coaches should be very good at this element of coaching.
No disrespect to family or friends but most will not listen the way a coach is trained to and will often be in solution mode rather than questioning you the correct way around exploring an issue or a subject to understand more about yourself.
An incisive question accurately identifies the limiting assumption that is holding us back and replaces it with a freeing one. One example would be if the coachee had a limiting belief that they are incapable of presenting to clients. A possible incisive question would be “If you knew that you can add real value to this client, how would you present to them?”.
Compare and Despair
I feel this is such a true statement in many areas of life, but it is often human nature to compare to other people. So often when you think about a career change, you will probably revert to thinking of people who have managed to successfully change career and possibly try to emulate them.
I feel this is good for ideas and a bit of a “stake in the ground” but if you follow this line of thinking too much it can only lead to a negative exploration of career change. Comparing careers with others should always be focused on what is pertinent to you and your skills and this sort of approach will be very blinkered, so all I am saying is just be aware of this approach.
Time and Space to Think
Imagine you task yourself with exploring a change in career; how would you go about pursuing this idea? The likelihood is that you will do some online research on the subject, chat to friends or family for guidance; some will give you advice but it is more than likely that you will not follow through with their suggestions.
You are most likely to follow a plan if you are the one who has thought about it! Coaching can give you that time and space to think about your transferrable skills when changing careers and with that you will inevitably come up with a solution.
Hopefully this has given you some food for thought and all I can suggest is why not try out a free 45 minute session to discuss a little more about coaching and how it may work for you. All you have to do is choose a coach that you would like to chat to and set up a call; there is no obligation on it so why not take the leap and explore what coaching can do for you.
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