By: Ryan
Effortless career switches are what Career Wizards do, on their own time of course. To be in control of your own trajectory like this, you have to have the right tools and systems. To execute an effortless career switch, there are many available tools including building a network in the target career, doing additional courses and certifications on the side, and applying what the entrepreneurs call a “Lean” method. “Lean” here means low waste and the Lean Startup method was adapted by a genius called Eric Ries from the Lean Software development approach and the Lean manufacturing approach developed by Toyota decades ago. The concept is that we want to focus on gaining evidence for our current Idea (or hypothesis really) of what is the most effective action to take, and we do that by taking the smallest step that can give us evidence (for or against) the current Idea .
What’s great about this is that it’s based on you doing things in the real world, not making up theoretical reasons for or against taking action (like you would do with a decision matrix), and it gets you moving and gets you testing your ideas to help you make a happier career! Also, thousands of persons around the world already use lean approaches across the business world, and in fact a book was written about a lean career. But we are going to give you here just what you need to do for your career switch.
So how would this work?
Well it’s a cyclical process, meaning that you go through 3 main steps and then repeat them until you find what you are looking for: happiness in your career. This means that it could take a few weeks or several months to do, but instead of sitting and waiting for others, you’d be getting interesting experiences throughout the entire time, which increases your confidence in any final decision you make, and ultimately your happiness.
1. Define/Refine Your Current Career Idea:
Define where you want to be, and what you want to do. You will be testing this Idea as you go, so it doesn’t have to be perfect, and it’s only the current one as it may change. Try this form:
“I would be happier as a _____________ doing ___________”.
Make this as specific as possible so that it’s easier to test. It would be harder to test “I would be happier as a tech person doing tech stuff” than to test “I would be happier as a software engineer doing websites for dentists”. Of course to make it specific takes some work, internal work. Here you may want to take some time alone to figure out what you don’t like about your current career and consider whether it’s a problem in the entire career (that is, several jobs you’ve had) or just in one job, or just one part of the job (like a specific co-worker only). It might also be useful to define what you do like about your current job and career since you may not want to lose that.
If you are frustrated in your old job, but you don’t yet know what you’d like to do instead, then you have several options for coming up with options. You can do any of the online tests that assesses your skills and interests and suggests careers or you can review how the skills from your existing job prepare you for another one. Try also to chat with family and friends to see what they suggest, and why. There are also online forums like Reddit where you can get suggestions. You should treat these as only options, that may change, and you should still do the internal work to figure out what you like and don’t like about your current job or career. With all this, you can shortlist a few career options that feel right and then pick the one that feels the *most* right to start. Insert that into your Current Career Idea as above.
Since you re looking for a career, the form of the the Idea should allow you to define an actual and meaningful job. We like to use the Ikigai concept from Japan: Ikigai “a reason for being” suggests that you may find a great career by defining your purpose. I’m sorry for making this so deep so soon, but you spend countless hours in work, so it might as well be meaningful! Some have broken it down into more useful criteria:
Hopefully that helps.
2. Do the *Minimum* Test:
Imagine the smallest test you could do to give you new information about the Current Career Idea you defined. This might be as simple as talking with someone who is doing what you say you want to do to see if they are happy, and what about the career contributes to that. This might help you imagine whether you’d be happy doing it. For careers that take a lot of training and certification, this might be the way to do it. For instance, if you wrote “I would be happier as a surgeon doing facial reconstructive surgery”, it would be hard to actually test it out. I’m letting you know now, I won’t volunteer my face for you to try out this side hustle. But of course if it’s some goal that you can actually try out, you might try to do a tiny project in that career to see how it feels. For instance, if you said “I would be happier as a software engineer building AI tools”, you can actually do that now with many of the AI platforms out there. You might use chatGPT (which is free) to create a tool for helping someone learn a language (I spent an hour creating one to help me re-learn Spanish by giving it all my background in high school Spanish and related languages like Portuguese. Pity I never actually use it though). Note that this test should be designed to give you new information. If you set a Career Idea of “I would be happier as a Real Estate salesman selling condos”, and you already know that you love interacting with people as part of your job, then doing a test that would just reveal that is not helpful. It’s better to test the next important aspect of your Idea which might be the process of talking with a person and turning them into a client that you can then show a property. So you might try a test of trying to find 1 person that might be in the market for a condo within a week. This focus on new information becomes more important as you cycle through this lean Career Switch process: each time you come back to Do the Minimal Test, you’d be doing a new test for additional information.
3. Check the Result:
It’s critical to spend some time assessing the result of your test. But how do you do that? For a Career Switch, you get to define the criteria that are important for the test, but they should all help you determine whether or not it supports your Current Career Idea. So for instance, you may have a simple question like “Result positively supports Current Idea ?” and if “yes”, then good! If “no”, then also good since it helps you to refine the current Idea (back to step 1). You might use the 4 questions related to Ikigai as evaluation criteria too. You should also include a some determination of whether you felt happy doing the test. So let’s say that you has a Idea of “I would be happier as a surgeon doing facial reconstructive surgery” and had a great chat with a friend that does facial surgery. The chat was very positive and you felt excited. The friend said that the field would be great to get into, and pays well with OK hours. But it would be expensive and would take you several years of training. What do you do now? Well you use your evaluation criteria: write an answer and describe why you gave it. For instance:
Since you will be doing many such small tests, you may want to write down these tests and results somewhere otherwise you may forget what you did and what was the result.
4. Repeat!:
After laying out your test results, all that’s left to do is repeat the entire process again! Now you would be doing 1. Refine Your Current Career Idea → 2. Do the Minimum Test and 3. → Check the Result. This is similar to the Build → Measure → Learn cycle of the Lean Startup Method. You would refine your Idea using the results of the test. A key benefit of writing out your results like above is that it helps you figure out how to (or whether to) refine your Current Career Idea , and what test to do next. For instance, in the example results for “I would be happier as a surgeon doing facial reconstructive surgery”, the top line result indicated that the result positively supports the Current Idea. That means that you don’t need to change the Idea. If the top line result was “No, test did not support the Current Idea”, then you might change the Idea to be something else, like another of the Careers that you listed out that “felt right”. You might also make a minor adjustment to the Current Idea (say from “I would be happier as a surgeon doing facial reconstructive surgery” → “I would be happier as a surgeon doing general surgery”).
Similarly, the results help you figure out the next test to do. In the sample results given, since they supported the Current Career Idea, that would remain the same, so the tests would continue to evaluate this Idea. It’s key to remember that each Current Career Idea represents a different life for you, so a single test cannot give you all the information you need. So the metric that showed the most uncertainty should be what you test next. In the example, that was Would I be good at it? → “I don’t know, it seems to need very precise hand eye coordination. I don’t know how good my skills are here.”. Here you might find a way to test whether you have the sufficient hand eye coordination to be a good surgeon. This might be something that you ask your Surgeon friend (Lyla in the example) to suggest ways to evaluate. Whatever is most open and unclear is what you should test next.
So how do you actually get a job with this framework?
The key to this approach is that you keep moving towards the ultimate goal of a successful career. This means that the tests should include larger and larger actions towards this goal. If your Current Career Idea is “I would be happier as a software engineer doing websites for dentists” this might be your flow:
The benefit here is that you have a structure to slowly develop yourself in the field and reduce risk while building your portfolio and chances of getting a job in the new career.
If your Current Career Idea is “I would be happier as a surgeon doing facial reconstructive surgery”, this might be your flow:
The benefit of this is that you should again be reducing risk by getting as must personalized information up front on what you would need to switch, and the impact on your life. For a career change that has a high cost (in time or money) before you can achieve your Career Idea, you should spend more time upfront on evaluating it.
Note that you may realize that you don’t actually want to leave your existing career, but really only the job or even only the unit that you are in. This might become apparent when you do the introspection described earlier. You may realize that it’s not the career that you hate, it’s just Janice in Accounting . In that case, maybe you can be more fruitful by finding ways around the problem, and that may be a job change rather than a career change.
So to become a Career Wizard in changing Careers, you now have a structure that can make the switch with less uncertainty, less risk, less worry and more action! Let us know how you fare in this novel approach.
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