Breaking down the Career Pivot

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Resources of the Week!

1. Check out our curated community job board!

2. Erin Riska and Kelli Hrvinak are two of my favorite follows on LinkedIn - they both have extensive careers in recruiting and HR, and offer really practical advice and analysis. Erin breaks down the JOLTs reports every month (here’s a post on the jobs report, and a follow-up on industries doing the most hiring). And Kelli had this great post on aligned with this on finding target companies.

The Next Two Weeks!

I’m on vacation the next two weeks so for this week, I wanted to rehash some content from one of the earliest issues of Landed! that had the highest open rate of any issue I’ve written - 78%! Hope this has some helpful nuggets for all of the career changers out there!

Next week’s issue will be 100% reader questions - submit your questions here!

My First Career Pivot 👩‍✈️

Last week, I did a LinkedIn poll to get inspiration for our topic this week and the consensus was clear - you want to know how to make a career pivot!

As someone who has done this a few times in my career, it’s something I’m really excited to dig into!

So first, I’m going to share a story:

Back in college, I was a sociology major who was unsure what she was going to do with her life, dating a guy in our business school who thought a lot about internships and his career options. I decided I needed an internship and found one - it paid $12/hour (AMAZING at a time when unpaid internships were the norm), and said finance majors only (definitely not me, I hadn’t even taken a finance class), but fortunately, I was naive enough to see this as a suggestion and not a rule.

I submitted an application and received an email letting me know I wasn’t qualified. So I looked up several people that worked there and wrote them that they were making a mistake, that I was great at math (which tells you how little I actually know about finance), and highlighted a million (ok, probably more like 3) things I had done that would help me contribute there.

Long story short, they invited me in for an interview, let me know I was still in fact not qualified for the internship, but then created a part-time role for me - 5 months later, they moved me into a formal internship.

That was my first career pivot and it came as a mix of:

1. Going after something I wasn’t quite qualified for

2. Leaning on my transferable skills, while building new skills

3. Networking

4. Being flexible and open to a winding road to your goal

5. Doing something that felt uncomfortable

And that’s pretty much what every career pivot requires.

When trying to pivot into a new kind of work or a new industry, you’ll face a lot more no’s. You likely won’t land your dream job right away. You’ll need to get a bit more creative around how you bring attention to yourself and prove yourself.

But if you’re up for the journey, you’re gonna love the destination!!

P.S. I spent 8 months there and it confirmed that I was not interested in office life and is why I went into teaching after college instead.

Real Talk about Career Pivots 🤸‍♀️

I’ve made several other career pivots in my life:

• As a classroom teacher, I moved into a position with an education non-profit where I worked in program management and teacher development.

• As someone with experience in talent development, but whose only recruiting experience was hiring for my own team, I moved into a Recruiting Leadership role with a school system.

• And as someone with recruiting experience in education/non-profits, I moved into a role in recruiting with a tech company.

On paper, it looks simple. But in practice, those moves all looked a lot like the steps above! For each of those moves:

• I leaned on networking. In fact, 2 of those roles involved referrals from my network, and several other roles that would have represented career pivots stemmed from referrals or connections made within my networks.

• I faced a TON of rejection. I applied to 50+ tech companies, and only landed interviews with maybe 10% of them.

• I was flexible about things like title and compensation. For example, moving into tech, I decided I was comfortable moving into an individual contributor role after years in management; many people discouraged this but I saw it as the fastest path into a new industry so I was open to it.

The chances of you getting a bigger title, making more money, moving into a new field, moving into a new industry, and working for a remote company all at once are really slim. That’s just real talk. I’m not saying it won’t happen, I’m just saying it’s unlikely. If you’re not in a rush, and you have great networks to help you get your foot in the door, it might happen for you.

But for most of us, we might have a few detours along the way. You may not land your dream job right away (but I mean let’s be real, how many of us are actually dreaming about work anyway?), but you can make progress towards that job with a few moves.

My Recommendations:

1. Focus on just one change at a time
Figure out your destination and then prioritize which change is most critical. Is your priority to earn more money? Change industries? Change to a completely different field? Pick on area to make a change vs trying to make a change in all of these areas.

• You’re an accountant at a non-profit who wants to work in tech sales? Well target accounting roles at tech companies first; then you can pivot to sales.

• You’re a teacher who wants to go into marketing in the private sector? Consider applying for a marketing coordinator role with your school district to learn marketing skills, and then pivoting to a marketing role outside of education.

These moves leverage the knowledge and skills you already have while minimizing your learning curve as you navigate a new role or industry.

2. Network, network, network
As a career pivoter, you are likely not the most obvious candidate. So you’re going to need to network!

• LinkedIn will show you people in your network that work at a company that interests you - connect with them and let them know about your interest!

• Follow and comment on content about your desired field or industry to build networks.

• Let people in your network know what you’re looking for.

• Ask for “informational interviews” where you can talk to people about their job and understand their path to it; this will help you determine what courses or certifications to target, and give you a connection that might be open to helping you.
  Grab my free guide to informational interviews here!

3. Upskill
There are tons of free/low cost courses out there to help you build the skills needed for a new role. You can even search Youtube to get familiar with tools. And then add those experiences to your current role.
For example, in recruiting, many companies use Greenhouse (ATS) and Gem (CRM) - tools that are less common in other industries. Take a few hours to learn them via YouTube videos and now you can add this to your resume!

4. Jazz up your resume
You can use a tool like Teal to tweak your resume and better align it to your next role - these tools will help you identify areas that may be missing on your resume.
Consider other areas you may have built skills - for example, maybe you never worked as a recruiter but you were on interview panels - well you can add that you were a part of hiring 12 employees for the marketing team to your resume! Skills gained volunteering, on committees at work, etc. are all fair game!

You can also tweak titles to be more relevant across industries. As an example, many non-profits use Manager and Director to represent individual contributor roles. Banks have VPs that would actually be manager level elsewhere. Consider tweaking your title to help it stand out to those searching for you.
Ex. “Recruiter” instead of “Recruitment Director” or “Assistant VP, Recruiting” (both titles I’ve seen for individual contributor recruiters)

Or, perhaps your title doesn't align with the roles you're targeting, but your experiences do - adjust the title to more accurately convey your background and stand out to recruiters.

Ex. Maybe you're an "Operations Manager" but you actually ran HR and Finance for your office, and you want to move into an HR role. Change it to "HR and Finance Manager"!

And to fly above 30,000 feet...

As a career pivoter, you may need to do more to showcase your skills than someone with a more linear career history. I recognize all of these suggestions will take a bit of extra work, but are steps you can take to show off your skills:

• Create a portfolio that shows some of your aligned work, projects, etc. You can add this as a link to your resume, or add it when you email/DM hiring managers and recruiters to let them know you applied.

• Show off your applicable skills by solving an existing issue. Applying for your first recruiter role? Source a few candidates, and draft an email that you might send that candidate to show that you can do the work despite your lack of experience. Applying for a sales role? Create an outbound email or a pitch deck. Applying a writer role? Write an article that would fit well on their blogs. Applying for a social media role? Create an example of a TikTok video that could fit great with the brand.

This is unpaid work, and it may not impact the outcome and there's nothing wrong with NOT taking these steps. However, very few candidates do any of these things so it IS a way to stand out from the crowd, and as a career changer, this could make the difference in landing an interview.

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🙋Answering Your Questions🙋

Each week, I’ll answer a few of your questions in this section. You can submit your questions here.

Another great question from the same subscriber who submitted last week’s question!! There are so many ways for us to learn and I encourage everyone to consider their learning style when figuring out how to grow as professionals.

For me, I learn best by collaborating with others and exploring new ideas…I have picked up a lot via newsletters and on social media for example, and discussing with peers and colleagues. I also try to just dive into new ideas or skills and learn on the go.

For others, conferences, courses, reading, or joining learning communities may be helpful.

On the AI-front, I have simply tried to play around with different tools so I can pick up new tricks, ways of getting better results, etc. I also follow a few creators in the AI-space who share tips for strong prompts, tools to try, etc. For example, you can check out AI Tool Report (subscribe for free here) to stay up to date on news in this space!

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