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Find a New Career By Repurposing Your Skills
Find a new career by repurposing your skills. Learn how to adjust your current professional skills to switch careers so that you are better prepared for a potential job loss. Avoid remaining idle and take action if your current job is compromised!
The notion in today's society is that you enter a field, hone your skills until you become incredibly well-versed in your line of work, and continue to practice that employment for the duration of your working life. What if something happens and you must quickly change your profession? It is important to be versatile and flexible with the abilities that you have acquired throughout your
education and/or work
experience.
You never know what may happen to the current position that you hold. Perhaps there are no openings in your field. This is why having the information required to take your existing skills and transferring them to a new career is so crucial to have a successful future.
It never hurts to be prepared, so follow these simple steps and make sure that you are better prepared for any change of course that comes your way.
Repurpose Your Skills to Find a New Career
- Evaluate Your Skills
It is difficult to determine what you believe you can adapt your career path toward when you are unaware of all your capabilities. Compile a list of all of your skills, certifications, accomplishments to evaluate what you think you should market yourself to be. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is incredibly important when you are attempting to adjust your abilities in a changing job market.
- Know Your Market
Now that you have taken the time to determine what skills you believe will be useful in the fields awaiting you, start searching. A job in a new field is not going to fall in your lap, especially if your contacts are in your line of work.
Study the market trends for your area to see what types of jobs are the most popular, well-paying, and available. As you search through the listings, take note of what abilities are required by the companies. With a bit of time, you will learn to recognize a pattern and begin to develop a sense of which market may accept you. Because you have an unrelated degree, certification, or set of abilities that doesn't mean that a somewhat unrelated company or position will not accept you! You would be surprised at the number of people who have jobs unrelated to what they have practiced or studied.
- Learn and Engage
While you are researching available jobs, make sure that you are continually improving your skills and making connections with others in various places. There are hundreds of online learning resources that you can become involved with to enhance or increase the abilities that you have. Discover resources through your local library, local business organizations, and previous schools you have attended.
In addition to studying up on current information, you should be engaged in the communities that you are considering entering. Expand your local networks and social networks and see what types of contacts you can make. It is the people that you meet and make connections with that are going to be able to assist you with your transition into your next profession.
In addition to meeting with people, you should also be involved with some community or volunteer programs. Get yourself out there in an industry related to your prospective new fields. These types of positions, although often unpaid, are incredible opportunities that can provide you with life-long contacts and opportunities.
- Revise your Resume
The final step to creating a smooth transition to your next position involves your resume. If you are interested in entering a different field, you must drastically change your resume to be appealing in the new profession.
Tailor your resume to a specific field and include all of the newly acquired skills as well as your previous achievements. Just because all of your prior work experience isn't related to the new career doesn't mean that it is useless. Take that information and edit the descriptions to relate to the new profession.
Employers admire overall job performance and character traits sometimes even more than experience, so use your personality to help you land a new position.
All these re-writes can, of course, be applied to your cover letter as well as the rest of your portfolio. Use our free tools to quickly and easily make these adjustments. Use action verbs and keywords taken from the intended field and work those into your writing.
After making these changes to your resume, experience, and most importantly, attitude, you will be on your way to a smoother transition from one career to another. Don't get discouraged; sometimes, the job market is rough and challenging to enter. However, with a lot of hard work and a little luck, you will be one step closer to switching career paths! With enough effort, you can find a new career by repurposing your skills and get back into the job market.
