Changing Lanes: Shifting to a New Industry or Function to Advance Your Career

By Joseph Ziccardi, Chief Executive Officer
Cromwell Partners

Executives can change careers after dedicating years of experience to a specific field. It’s difficult, but possible for those who are committed and motivated. For some executives, the decision to change is voluntary. For others, changing one’s career is motivated by a depressed economy, the downturn of a specific industry, or a decrease in demand for one’s current skill set. Consider some recent examples:

• A stockbroker left a major brokerage firm to open an Arby’s franchise. (He now owns several.)
• A Wall Street financial analyst left his high-powered job to join his family’s auto mechanic business.
• A telecommunications salesman launched his own landscaping business.
• An accountant for a major securities firm on Wall Street left to fly fighter planes in the navy.

Such dramatic changes in life will most likely affect the way you provide for your family, so you should be cautious and prepared. Children’s schooling, financial retrenchment, and community obligations can become difficult issues, stressful on the entire family, and can often result in divorce.

Internal obstacles include fear, reluctance, procrastination, and lack of experience, skills, talent, or the right personality. Some of these obstacles can be overcome by training; others are more difficult to surmount.

Finally, the economy, the job market, your industry, and your job function are factors you can’t control. If you’re changing lanes, it’s best to spend your time and energy on personal factors that you can control.

Establish a Game Plan

Balancing your dreams with financial realities can be difficult. Most people find that they have to trade off what they like to do with what they have to do. Someone supporting a family may not have the luxury of starting over financially.

Assess your priorities in life—spending more time with family, working for yourself, starting a business, managing versus not managing. If your decision is to begin another career, is education important, or are you putting too much emphasis on education? Incidentally, the number of people going back for advanced degrees (master’s, Ph.D.) between the ages of 35 and 50 is incredible. If you fear that you are too old to go back to school, think again.

Take an inventory of your talents, skill sets, and experiences. Analyze the talents you were born with, the skill sets you’ve learned, and the experiences you’ve gained. Decide whether to stick with what you know or change your job function. What training or education is required? What sacrifices will need to be made by you and your family? Have you communicated this information? Are they committed?

Choose a field (whether related to your current field of expertise or a new one) that will have demand in the near future. Review demographics, industry trends, and growing companies. Develop a personal sales and marketing strategy. Remember, this is business, and business is about profit. Express yourself in terms of how you can decrease expenses or increase revenues and, equally important, who you are marketing that information to. Identify the person who really cares about how much money you can save (or how much revenue you can generate). Read sales books—Selling to Vito, by Anthony Parinello, is one of my favorites when it comes to this subject. This is not a book about searching for a job. It is a book about selling yourself and targeting the right people in an organization. This is critical, and I cannot emphasize it enough. Target the buyers of your product or service. Know what "Me Inc." sells and who would want to pay for it. Then make sure you have a strong presentation (written and verbal). Poof! You’re in sales!

One strategy that has worked well for a number of job seekers is the try-and-buy strategy. Offer your services on a consulting or interim basis to help out a hiring manager with a short-term problem. These assignments can sometimes result in longer-term opportunities. Another approach is to offer your services on a results-only basis. However, structure such an arrangement very carefully, with a full understanding of your P&L responsibility.

Should you focus on using the human resource department as your contact? It depends on the size of the company. Often, busy HR executives handle multiple tasks (one of which may or may not be recruiting) and various requests in their organizations. They receive many resumes each week and typically will respond to you only if your resume is a perfect fit (which, if you are changing lanes, is highly unlikely).

What about age? Although this is a concern for many people who are looking to make career changes, hiring managers have come to appreciate the wisdom, stability, and loyalty of older employees. Many hiring managers are disappointed with the younger generation of employees. There has been a widening of the workforce generation gap fueled by the dot-com years. While there are some excellent younger and hardworking professionals, many are viewed (by older hiring managers) as lacking loyalty, stability, commitment, and diligence. I believe this has created a more open mind-set to hiring mature professionals.

Executing Your Job Search

A career change requires much preparation, research, and due diligence. When you have finally made your decision and set your goals, you must allocate the time each day to work on your plan. This requires patience, persistence, and discipline. There is no single best way to find a job, so you must cover all your bases. You can use online resources to examine industry trends and companies that are growing. There are thousands of job boards, many of which specialize in or are targeted to a particular field. Many companies now use their own web sites to list open positions, and this should not be overlooked.

Networking and cold-calling hiring managers directly still rate as very effective ways to find a job. Unfortunately, executive recruiters are not helpful when it comes to finding a job with a different career path—unless you are interested in transferring your functional skills to a different industry. Financial executives in consumer electronics companies may be able to find new positions in pharmaceutical companies, for example.

Market Factors

The best time to change lanes is when the job market is strong and there is a high demand for talent. Employers are more flexible and there are more jobs to choose from. The demand for people keeps salaries competitive, there are more start-ups, and smaller companies are experiencing growth. In addition, more job offers are rejected. This makes the hiring manager much more receptive to candidates whose backgrounds may not be an exact fit.

Unfortunately, there is an inverse relationship between the number of people looking to change lanes and the number of employers looking to hire someone. In a recession, far more people are looking to change careers, and there are fewer jobs overall. With fewer jobs to choose from, it becomes a buyer’s market for employers, and hiring managers become extremely selective. In addition, hiring managers fear for their own jobs and are under pressure to cut expenses in any way they can. This is where salary and bonus compression sets in and companies begin reducing their payroll costs. Most people making career changes have to accept a significant reduction in pay—20 to 50 percent of previous earnings. However, over time, many of these people excel and surpass their previous earnings.

The Resume

Your resume is your brochure and should be designed with your target audience in mind. When changing industry or function, focus more on core competencies and talent and less on the details of your previous job. Sell the fact that you are a winner and that you can be a winner in another industry. Make sure that the resume is not only accomplishment-oriented but that it also states what those accomplishments can do for the hiring manager. Change the paradigm by thinking of yourself as "Me Inc." and focusing on what you are selling. Become a self-promoter, creating vignettes and gathering testimonials for your audience to see.

Don’t fudge details or hide gaps. Be truthful about what you have been earning or how long you may have been out of work. Being out of work for a period of time does not necessarily have the same stigma that it did 20 years ago. Hiring managers understand layoffs, recessions, mergers and acquisitions, and industry downturns.

Changing Lanes, Changing Life

While I have seen disappointments, most people who change careers wind up back on their feet. Develop the plan; work the plan; stay focused.