Career Change Mistakes you Need to Avoid if You want Success
If I could do my career pivot all over again, I would avoid these 3 mistakes. I'm George. I'm a career coach for corporate millennials, and I also made my own big career pivot from corporate HR to independent career coaching about 2 years ago.
I would do these 3 things differently.
The first mistake I made was feeling embarrassed to tell people that I was job searching in the first place.
I was afraid that looking for a new job looked like a scarlet letter among my friends in my community and that it said something negative about me and my abilities, so I stayed quiet for a while. But really when you think about it, it is the most natural thing for humans to evolve and look for new opportunities, and I wouldn't bat an eye at someone else telling me that they were job searching, so why did I feel like it was weird or embarrassing to tell other people that I was looking?
The second mistake was applying to the same types of jobs I already had on my resume.
If I wanted to make a career change, why was I applying to the same jobs I already had because I knew I was qualified and that I could get those jobs? It was kind of like a security blanket helping me procrastinate on applying for the ones that I actually wanted on making a change. It took me getting to the final round interviews for 2 different jobs that I had already done at 2 different companies and having slight panic attacks at GET the thought of getting an offer to finally start applying for the roles I really wanted.
The 3rd mistake was only relying on LinkedIn job postings.
Only about 60% of available opportunities are listed on sites like Indeed, LinkedIn Zip, Recruiter etc. The rest 40% approximately are in the hidden job market; they're never publicized but they are offered through networking. And as someone in 7 years in HR, I knew this logically, yet I still spent so much precious time passively scrolling on LinkedIn and other websites instead of doing the work that I knew would actually make a difference.
Here is something you might want to digest. I will take this example from my daughter who switched careers and became more successful. She changed her career at 30 years and never looked back. Below is what she told me.
I went from a Psychology Student to a Salon Owner and Now a Digital & Affiliate Marketer. I feel like this is the most clear I’ve been when it comes to choosing the right career path for myself.
I definitely wasn’t ready to conjure up a suitable career path for myself when I was 18 but there is a small population of people who have always known what they wanted to do from a very early age. I wasn’t those people. Only at 34 I realize digital marketing is the career path for me. It ticks ALL MY BOXES.
Let’s start the conversation, what do you do now, and if you were to start all over again what would you like to do?
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