Common Career Change Mistakes to Avoid
When thinking about changing careers, making miss-steps along the way is easy. We have looked at some of the most common ways people trip themselves up when pursuing a career change to help you avoid these potential pitfalls.
Top Career Change Mistakes
There are several ways to make what should be a time for personal growth, sourcing new opportunities and taking personal control of the direction of your life a lot harder than it has to be. It is always going to be challenging to embark on such a journey, but there are easier ways and harder ways that it can be done.
Taking a Blind Leap of Faith
Changing careers can feel like leaping off a cliff and trying to fashion a pair of wings for yourself on the way down, but it doesn’t have to. It can often be a far better idea to approach career change in a methodical manner, so that you can put in place the steps that will allow you to descend the cliff gracefully instead, in an orderly manner.
In practice, the steps you can take to make a move to a new career can be things like making a career change plan that you will be following and setting aside a career change budget. This will pay for any training needed and tide you over until you can find a suitable job in your new area of interest.
A lack of forward-thinking can make it much harder to succeed in what you are trying to do in any situation, which is as accurate of career change as any other.
Quitting a Career Instead of a Job
When you are employed in a job you hate, it can be easy to feel disillusioned with the whole industry and mistake the individual job for representing the entire area. This can lead to considering career change, when actually what was needed to improve happiness was simply a change of job within the same industry.
Career change is difficult, and those considering it shouldn’t do so lightly. The best course of action is to ask yourself what attracted you to your career in the first place and look at what it would take for you to be happy again. If the changes are primarily different personnel being involved, such as co-workers or management, then it may be that you should be looking for other jobs within the same industry rather than a wholesale career change.
If, on the other hand, there is an aspect or several aspects of the job that you are struggling with, it may be time to look toward a career change. Be sure that the parts of the job you find difficult can’t just be handed off to another staff member, as this would allow you to remain within the same industry and avoid the upheaval that comes from dramatic life changes.
Starting Before Your Are Ready
It can take time to prepare yourself to exit an old career and enter a new one. The time before you jump should be spent honing your contacts and ensuring that you have everything you need in place for the time to make your move. Ideally, you should have a career change budget saved up in order to pay for the things that you need to make a smooth career transition.
An excellent way to prepare for success in your new field is to consider going part-time or volunteering first while still in your stable current career. This way, you can build valuable and relevant experience so that when the time comes, it is much easier to secure a full-time job in your new career.
This also affords you the opportunity to test-drive the new career and ensure that it is really the one for you before leaving the security of the career that you have spent much of your working life doing. Starting a new career and then realising that it isn’t the panacea that you had thought it was going to be can be very difficult, so if you can find this out in advance of making a permanent change, it can save you some heartache further down the line.
Making Money the Primary Consideration
Some people approach career change with the outlook and the expectation that the new career will pay a lot better than the one they were in before. This is all well and good as long as the downsides that are present are also given due consideration. It is entirely possible to undertake a change in career and end up less happy than you were in the previous one.
This often tends to come about because the career changer hasn’t considered things like the lack of flexibility compared to their previous career or the long hours that they are expected to work as standard. The commute also has the potential to become an issue if it hasn’t been considered.
When people put money at the centre of their thinking when it comes to career change, this can lead to a lot of unhappiness later, so it is important to take a well-rounded view and look at all of the angles, not just the obvious financial one.
Expecting Overnight Success
When changing careers, many people expect to be successful overnight and to begin to make contacts and progress immediately in their new field. It can take time to become established in any new area of work, and when you are coming from a career where you are already well-established, this can be a hard lesson to learn.
It can feel frustrating to have to prove yourself when this is something you are not used to doing, and it can cause people to become disillusioned with their new career before they have really started.
Starting out with realistic expectations can help to manage the changes and to ensure that the move into a new phase of your working life starts out much more smoothly. Remind yourself that Rome wasn’t built in a day and that it takes time to become established in any field.
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