You Don't Need to "Start Over" in Order to Change Your Career
Recently, I had drinks with a friend who is interested in leaving her current job but scared about figuring out what's next and taking that leap. When I asked her what she was looking for next, she listed an increase in title or pay. When I asked what type of company she wanted to work at, she wasn't sure. I wondered out loud if she would be a good fit in a different job title or at a different type of company, moving away from e-commerce, and she said "I don't want to change careers and have to start over!"
This statement stopped me in my tracks—
This is a woman with 14 years of post-collegiate professional experience who works in a senior-level role. Regardless of all that, she's a designer, a genius problem solver, and an incredible collaborator who anyone would be beyond excited to have as a colleague. Despite all of this, when it comes to "success" she can only imagine the next rung on her current corporate ladder. She feels like if she strays from her existing path she will have to "start back at the bottom" and worries she can't do that at her age. She feels she needs one more role, one title higher than this current one, to have permission to explore, pivot, and do different work.
This isn't the first time I've heard this assumption. I have had countless informational interviews with people of all ages who are "changing careers" into User Experience (UX). They've embodied this "start over" mindset, paid a boot camp or graduate school for the certification, and downplayed (or in some cases literally erased) their previous job experiences from their resumes and stories.
As an example:
Years ago, I spoke to a guy in his early 30s who had gotten a certification in UX from General Assembly (GA). He was looking for unpaid internships at the time…which is not something I recommend to anyone; you should always be paid for your work. To get more details, I asked him about his work history and he told me about his psychology undergraduate degree, the GA classes, and the projects that he had completed with a client within the program. When pressed, he admitted that he had worked for years at Geico as an insurance adjuster. Not a glamorous job, I get why he didn’t mention that up-front! But once he described the day-to-day duties of that job, we discovered he had a lot of skills related to getting hard information out of people, having challenging conversations, and remaining unbiased in complex situations. All of these are excellent skills for a UX researcher to have. By the time we were done talking, he had a totally different view of his past work and an understanding of how it connected—his confidence visibly increased on the spot! And since our conversation, he has found work in UX and is currently gainfully employed.
I am a firm believer that you don't need existing roles or certifications to pivot what you do for a living. If you have years of work experience, what's more important is (a) what you believe you can do and (b) the way you talk about and connect your past work to the new direction.
I have changed careers many times. Yes, for one of those transitions, I did get a graduate degree. But I needed that institutional stamp of permission more than anyone else. Each of my career changes has instead been bolstered by a story, the projection of what I want to do out into the world, and the people I tell that to. And yours can be too.
So, what is the story that will help you find a new direction?
