TRUST IN YOUR ACQUIRED SKILLS
Apply your current self to become your next self. Melanie Burgess reports
ACAREER change is on the cards for seven in 10 Australians, and the transition may not be as difficult as they imagine.
Experts find many of the skills sought by employers are those that can be gained – and applied – in any sector.
Research commissioned by training organisation Nutritional Therapy Association of Australia reveals 25 per cent of workers are unhappy in their job and 70 per cent want to pursue a different career.
SEEK resident psychologist Sabina Read says the key to a successful career change is to take deliberate and concrete steps toward moving into the new industry.
“Prospective employers need to hear a positive, action-oriented story, rather than one based on dreams and hopes alone,” she says.
The career changer should then reframe their thinking so they are not focusing on their lack of industry experience but rather the skills and experience they already have that will help them succeed in the new career.
Read says these are the transferable skills.
“(They are) a collection of abilities and learnings that you have acquired over the course of your lifetime that are non-specific to any job or industry but are important for you to identify and be able to sell to prospective employers, regardless of industry,” she says. She recommends career changers make a list of the skills they have and the skills they require in the new career, then join the dots between the two.
“If you’re unsure (which required skills to list), check out job ads that appeal and make a note of the skills they are looking for,” she says.
Jarrod Wall spends his days coding, developing software and managing his team as a software engineering lead for data and artificial intelligence start-up HyperAnna.
It is a far cry from what he imagined of his career as he was studying animation after school.
“When the (global) financial crisis hit, production houses and studios around Australia closed down, making it difficult to get a job in the industry,” he says.
He returned to university to dive deeper into animation and discovered he needed to enrol in a few coding subjects to gain the credits he needed.
Soon enough, he saw the power of coding in automation and shifted into the AI and business intelligence industry.
The hardest part of the career change was coming to terms with no longer pursuing his dream career in the film industry.
After juggling two careers for a while, though, he realised he had to choose one and decided to leave animation behind.
“As I had invested so much into animation, it felt like it was a waste not to use the skillset I’d built over the years,” he says.
“However, as I went into coding, I realised that the skillset was not lost, it had just shifted focus.
“We use software development platform GitHub to work collaboratively across our team, and build on existing projects that are available through its open source community, as the platform hosts millions of public code that can be leveraged to learn and create something greater.”