There are a million career change stories out there. Icy at Individual Chic left a comment in response to yesterday’s article, The “can do” skill, about a friend of hers who went from being a chemical engineer, to an animator for Disney!

That’s quite a significant career shift!

A few years ago I was chatting to a careers advisor who told about me about a stockbroker working in Sydney, who had probably presented the worse case of career burn out he had ever seen.

The stockbroker was apparently working 18 hours a day, six days a week. Even on his “day off” he was still studying market trends and keeping in touch with clients.

Then one morning he woke up and decided he’d had enough. He wanted time to slow down so he could “smell the roses”, and take in a bit more of what was happening around him.

He had approached the careers advisor because he simply had no idea what he wanted to do next. The advisor subjected him to all sorts of career aptitude tests, but none of the results seemed to excite the stockbroker.

Then one morning the erstwhile stockbroker arrived at the careers advisor’s office announcing he had found his new vocation in life; sweeping leaves in the nearby domain!

Apparently he had seen a council worker going about his duties in the park and had become ever more curious as to what the job entailed.

It was outdoors work. The hours were set, 8am to 4pm, five days per week. No overtime. And as a bonus, he really could take time to “smell the roses” in the park!

So he went from being a stockbroker on a six-figure salary, to a gardener on a far more humble income. But he was happy. He still apparently felt that way some months later when the careers advisor saw him one morning.

The only adjustment the former stockbroker really had to get used to was the change in lifestyle, as a result of the reduction in his salary!

This story reminded me of a former boss of mine. He had been for some years the assistant general manager of a nationwide company.

Then the company was taken over, and it was decided it would be totally dissolved. The assistant general manager was made CEO of the soon to be defunct entity, and was charged with the task of winding up the operation.

It turned out to be the most stressful six months of his life, as he had to make colleagues he had worked with for years redundant, and break up the company he had spent years trying to build up!

Eventually his last day of arrived, and after leaving with his final pay cheque, wondered what he would do next for work.

Then he spotted a “now hiring” sign on a gateway, and within minutes had signed up for work as a building site labourer!

According to former colleagues who saw him some years later, he was still very happy in his new career, even though he could easily have found another executive role. He however just wasn’t interested in the responsibility (read: stress) that came with such a position.

Changing careers is about finding meaningful work. Work you find meaningful, whatever that is. Not the next person, or the neighbours, definition of meaningful, but yours.

In fact I shouldn’t even call the two career transitions I’ve just described as “downshifting”. If it’s what you want to do, then it is neither going downwards nor backwards.

Have you ever met people who just seem to choose to pursue a new career and, lo and behold, what seems like a mere few months later, they are doing it?

And I’m not talking about a graduated sort of career or job change, such as an assistant accountant becoming an accountant, for instance.

In fact there would be some people who couldn’t discern the slightest difference between the two roles, including possibly, even the former assistant accountant, until of course they saw their first payslip as a full blown accountant!

It was something I was thinking about the other day after meeting a, now former, accountant who had decided she wanted to become an article writer.

And six short months after making the decision, she was doing it, that is writing for newspapers, magazines, and even websites, and making a living at the same time.

While her current income is greatly reduced, compared to that of her previous job, at the rate she is going, I dare say in another six months she will be making more than she ever did as an accountant!

When I asked how she did it, that is made quite a significant career shift in a relatively short space of time, she simply answered, “because I wanted to do it.”

And I think much of her success has to do with her attitude. Because I wanted to.

It also made me think about a few of the jobs I had during my early days in the working world.

At first I worked as a bank teller. That was a big mistake, since I just didn’t have the necessary customer service ethic, despite the best “efforts” of the then branch manager to try and instill that in me!

After leaving the bank I took a job as a buyer of spare parts for a mining company. I immediately found myself talking to mining engineers and sales representatives who were located all over the world.

I’d just spotted the job in the newspaper classifieds, thought it looked interesting, contacted the hiring manager, told him it looked a fun job and that I was willing to learn, and next thing I knew I was a buyer of spare parts for mining machinery.

After leaving that role I became a school bus services administrator, specifically planning rural school bus services.

This job saw me spend a lot of time on the road, meeting bus company managers, school principals, and staying in charming hotels in equally charming country towns.

Travel certainly can be an under appreciated aspect of a job, and what people tend to forget is it gets them out of the office! How bad can that be?!

I’d had no prior experience in either of the roles after my time at the bank, yet I’d managed to drop myself into them without any big deal, or without calling either transition a career change!

While I certainly had some transferable skills; such as organisational, communication, and problem solving abilities, among others, a lot of my “success” was down to my attitude, and the fact I was willing to jump in, and give it a go, while also learning on the fly.

In much the same way as my accountant turned writer friend had. It is a reminder to me that a “can do” attitude is perhaps the most important (transferable) skill any of us can develop.

A reader wrote in asking what sort of transferable skills a professional sports person would be likely to have, and how they could go about finding a new career once their sporting days were over.

It’s an interesting question because I am not exactly sure there is a clear answer, aside from the stock standard “it depends”.

When we think of transferable skills we are referring to certain skills that can be taken from one job, or career, and used again in an entirely different work situation.

However I could not imagine too many baseball pitchers, or football strikers, being able to make use of their specialist sporting talents in an office situation, for instance.

Despite their ability to “achieve targets” or “reach goals”!

Depending on the type of sport, team or individual, and whether any sort of leadership role (team captain for example) was part of a person’s sporting career, transferable skills could include abilities such as player management, team planning, strategy, organisation, communication, public relations, and, of course, teamwork.

And it is these sorts of skills that result in some former sports people being appointed (or possibly headhunted) to senior management roles in the corporate world after their sporting careers have concluded.

Rather than looking outwards though, many sports people approaching retirement may be able to find a role that allows them to remain closely associated with the sport they have probably devoted a large part of their lives to.

And let’s face it, the majority of professional sports people are already doing something they love, so it makes sense for them to stay in the same arena, as it were, and utilise their knowledge and experience in other ways.

There are the obvious opportunities to take up coaching and mentoring roles, or become involved in the management, or administrative, side of the game or code.

Depending on the level of profile an individual has built up during their career, there may be media career opportunities, and this sees a number of former sports people become radio or TV commentators.

Some retired sports people have become involved in a number of other media related activities, ranging from being newspaper sports writers, to doing product endorsements.

Others have been able to benefit from the profile they gained during their sporting careers to establish businesses after their retirement.

Tracey Wickham, a former swimmer with the Australian Olympic team, is now a circuit speaker and also founded a public relations company after her swimming career ended.

There are also a number of other prominent Australian sports people, who have established ventures unrelated to their sporting activities, whilst still in the midst of their playing careers.

George Gregan, who is the current captain of the Australian rugby team, the Wallabies, has a chain of coffee shops in Sydney, while Brett Lee, a bowler with the Australian cricket team as established a men’s fashion label.

So rather than just thinking about transferable skills, sports people approaching retirement should also consider how to transfer their knowledge and experience into another aspect of the sport, and also look at how their sporting profile, or persona, may likewise be of benefit after retirement.

Yesterday I made a few suggestions as to how to respond should a headhunter call to sound out your interest in jumping ship to work for another company. (Or making an “unsolicited offer of employment”, as an email correspondent put it!)

I also mentioned in yesterday’s discussion that I actually ended up being headhunted into a web design role, despite having little commercial design experience, and having searched - and applied - without luck for a number of positions prior to that.

The prospect of being “headhunted” into a job began to intrigue me after hearing that is what happened to someone else I knew, who was also making a career transition into web design.

A local design studio had found her personal website, and the creative director was so impressed with what he saw, that he contacted her and almost immediately offered her a design job.

I quickly realised that there was little difference in the way she was “pitching” herself, to the way I was.

We both had a reasonably prominent online presence by way of our personal websites, we were both networking with other professional (or established) web designers, and we both also promoting ourselves by way of our involvement in various “sideline” web projects.

In my case this included being a then founder of The Australian INfront, a community that I was involved in establishing, whose aims where to raise the visibility and perception of Australian web designers globally.

While I know not everyone reading this article is looking for web design work, there are still a number of things that anyone can do to raise their visibility and profile, and put themselves on a headhunter’s radar.

Get yourself noticed (somehow, anyhow)
A great way to do this is to start a blog, something I explored in another article recently, which outlined how blogging can be an effective self-promotional tool in the career change, or job search, process.

In fact the article attracted a number of comments from people who mentioned that a blog had boosted their profile and even resulted in job offers.

I also recently read an article at manzkie dot com about recruitment managers who search through the blogosphere looking for potential employees.

Do I need to push this particular point any further?!

Develop a specialist knowledge
Build on your passion for what you want to do. Focus on an aspect of the job that is not as widely recognised as others, become an expert on it, and then make sure you advertise the fact!

In my case this was an interest in web standards. Put briefly web standards are a uniform set of rules web designers should adhere to when developing websites. For various reasons few designers were, ten or so years ago using standards, so by learning to work with them natively from day one, I was able to stand out from other web designers.

Ironically, despite the fact I no longer work as a web designer, I still receive occasional freelance work offers, because one former colleague or another’s clients have stipulated that the design work be standards compliant!

Network!
This goes without saying, and is just about the best way to achieve anything. As always it is a case of who you know, followed closely by what you know.

Look around for networking forums in the industry you are interested in, whether on or off line, and make yourself known!

MeetUp is an increasingly popular way of bringing all sorts of people, with all sorts of interests - both personal and professional - together, and you are bound to find an interest group near where you live.

Even if you don’t, members of the various Meetup groups often place their blog, or website, addresses on their Meetup profiles, so even if a like minded person is at some distance, you can still make contact and network with them.

And you never know, even though someone is in another city, or even country, they may know a former colleague, or associate, who is in your area and looking for staff.

Get involved
Can’t find a networking forum, or association, relevant to your industry or work interests, locally? Then start one! Taking some sort of initiative is exactly the sort of activity headhunters are on the look out for.

And once more thanks to ideas such as Meetup, this can be achieved relatively quickly and at not too great a cost.

Conclusion
While I’m not suggesting that you sit around waiting to be headhunted, you certainly have nothing to lose by boosting your profile, and self promotional activities, to the point that an employer may just spot you, and subsequently make contact.

And if you are making a career change, being headhunted into a job that you really want could be the lucky break you are looking for, as it was for me.

While I was searching for web design work several years ago, it was mainly by way of the targeted job search method, which I wrote about recently.

It was a process that had its ups and downs, as I have referred to before, but was something I was prepared to stick at, as it best suited my circumstances at the time.

You could therefore imagine my surprise when an email arrived, out of the blue, from a company I had not had any dealings with previously, asking if I would be interested in discussing the possibility of working for them.

“You’ve been headhunted!” a friend said to me.

Had I really? To me headhunting always seemed like an activity that was the result of clandestine meetings that followed clandestine telephone calls or letters, between highflying company executives, and specially engaged executive recruiters!

“No, no,” my friend said, “just about anyone, no matter what they do, stands to be headhunted.”

Some people regard it as an honour, while others see a certain prestige in being “hand picked” for a role. It means your work has been noticed by, or your name has been mentioned to, someone who is looking for staff.

While certainly an uplifting experience it is a good idea to rein in your euphoria though, and remember that being headhunted is really just an invitation to apply for a job, and there is no guarantee that you will actually be offered a role.

After all an employer’s first hand impressions of you may differ markedly from the second, or third hand, impressions they have gained of you from others.

Or to use the words of my headhunting-wise friend;

“Consider being headhunted as a free walk to the second interview of a three interview recruiting process.”

That seemed like a good way to put what had happened to me into perspective. Being headhunted is really just another way of applying for a job, and you shouldn’t get too far ahead of yourself as a result.

Headhunters can make contact in a number of ways, and if you already have a close working relationship with the company interested in bringing you on-board, this may even happen in a face-to-face situation, during or after a regular meeting, with the people you normally liaise with.

On other occasions you may be contacted unexpectedly, by a company you have not even heard of.

Assuming you have been contacted by email or letter, the first thing to do before responding to the person, or representative, who made the approach to you, is to find out what you can about the company in question.

While this is a commonsense course of action when looking for work anyway, it is still a good idea to know what you are talking about before you speak to anyone. Find out about the company’s background, and see what you can learn about of some of their current and recent projects, particularly in the area in which you think you may be working.

If it is possible, try to find out how you came to the company’s attention. If someone put in a good word for you, contact them, and ask what they said about you. It can be useful to know exactly how you have been represented, as this can guide your initial communications with the company.

Approach all contact and interviews in a professional manner, and above all do not act as if you are a shoo-in for whatever role is being discussed, and also send thank you emails, or notes, after each meeting or interview.

The fact you are being headhunted may offer you a little more leverage when it comes to discussing salary plus terms and conditions of employment though. To what degree you can bargain here will depend on your skills and abilities, together with exactly how interested the company is in hiring you.

I went on to be offered a role with the web design studio who had contacted me, which I accepted. In my case, I was extremely pleased with the outcome, considering I didn’t actually have a great deal of commercial web design work under my belt at the time.

You may therefore be wondering how I came to be headhunted. It was pretty simple really, I was headhunted because I wanted to be! There’s nothing like a little ambition to get you where you want to go is there?!

Tomorrow, in the second part of this article, I will tell you how I went about getting myself headhunted!

As I said yesterday work experience can be a valuable exercise for anyone who would like to find out more about what a job entails on a day-to-day basis.

And while work experience opportunities aren’t exactly a dime a dozen, you should be able to find something with a little searching around though.

Since such possibilities are not waiting behind every door you knock on, you will need to make the most of the chances that do come along, and with this in mind I’ve prepared a list of some things to think about when looking for, or undertaking, work experience.

Emphasis your skills and knowledge
Before considering a work experience request, an employer will want to know you have something to offer the company and that you will, in return for being granted an opportunity to be part of the workplace, be able to make some sort of contribution.

Therefore think of asking for work experience as being the same as applying for a regular job. Put your best foot forward, and make sure the workplace is aware you have the appropriate skills.

While an employer will obviously understand you don’t have a whole lot of experience, they will still want to know you at least have some sort of understanding of what is happening, and can participate somehow, while you are there.

Rules of engagement
Before commencing the work experience period find out exactly how involved you will be in the process. In some instances you will be quite active, while in other situations you may be expected to sit quietly and purely observe.

I once heard of a commercial photographer who was happy to provide photography students with on-the-job “experience” on the strict proviso they did not actually get involved, or ask him any questions while he was with clients, or working.

This is something that has to be respected, and while it may seem you are not gaining much “hands on” experience, you can still learn a lot from simply being a fly on the wall as it were, so long as you pay close attention to what is happening.

Take notes
Don’t forget to take a notepad and a couple of pens. You will probably spend a lot of time “looking over someone’s shoulder” and watching how they work, so keep notes of what is happening.

Try and write down as much as you can, even if this is just keeping a record of how each day unfolds. Record details of meetings, problems and issues that arise and how they are resolved, plus any other tips, or handy “inside” knowledge, that comes to light while you are present.

Remember you are with someone who knows what they are doing inside out, so this is a great chance to learn a few “tricks of the trade”!

Any questions?
Remember that workloads can fluctuate and deadlines vary on very short notice, especially in creative or publishing environments.

For example the web design studio that last week told you they were a “little quiet”, may have a rush of work on when you arrive. Therefore bear in the mind the person you are sitting with may not have time to stop and explain every last thing they are doing.

Rather than interrupt with questions every few minutes, write them down and see if some time can be set aside later to discuss them.

Network!
While onsite try and get as involved as you are able to. If a problem needs solving, see if you can suggest a solution. Make your presence felt in as helpful a way as possible.

Introduce yourself to as many people as you can, and tell then what it is you are doing, and why. Get to know people and build up some rapport, and see if you can stay in contact with them after you leave.

If you can, go along to the company’s “Friday afternoon” drinks if you are invited, and view it as an opportunity to network.

Remember a lot of jobs are filled through contacts and networks, so it is well worth the effort.

Conclusion
While you are unlikely to be paid for doing work experience, if you make the right impression your efforts could be rewarded in other ways.

The person you were working with may be prepared to offer you a reference, or possibly even recommend you for a vacancy in the company, or even to an associate working elsewhere who is looking to hire.

If nothing else however, you will at least leave your work experience time with a better understanding of the sort of work you one day want to do.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the value of speaking to what I referred to as a “career insider” in order to get the low down, or nitty gritty, on a job or career that you are interested in.

While having a chat to someone who knows what they are talking about is an excellent way to gain insights and learn things that may have evaded your research efforts to date, there is no substitute for some on-the-job experience.

The term “work experience” probably takes many of us back to our high school, or university days, where in some cases a certain amount of practical experience was a compulsory aspect of whatever course of study we were doing.

As always it is one thing to read, or study, about the workings of a certain profession, while it is another matter all together to gain first hand experience of it.

Several years ago a friend who was studying a commerce degree spent a week working in the finance department of a well known Australian company, and at the end of the “experience” quipped “I can’t believe I need a degree to work in a place like that!”

She went on say that there wasn’t one instance in the week she spent there, where she was able to apply anything she had learnt at university. While her assessment was mildly sarcastic, it nevertheless illustrates how big the divide between the theoretical, and the practical, can be.

Since work experience terms are relatively short in length, usually only lasting a week or two, there is no way every on-the-job situation and eventuality, both positive and negative, will arise. Nevertheless it is still something career changers should consider, as it offers a number of benefits.

In the first instance it can reaffirm the desire to pursue a specific career, and secondly it can provide some sort of an on the ground feel for what a particular role entails.

It can also be a way of building networks and contacts, especially if you manage to make a good impression. I’ve seen a number of instances where someone who has come into a company for work experience, has subsequently been favourably considered for roles that have arisen after their on-the-job time.

While quite valuable, work experience opportunities can be difficult to come by though. When we did our on-the-job stints while at high school or university, it was usually as a result of an arrangement between the school and the participating workplaces.

And since very few work experience opportunities are ever publicly advertised, it is up to the individual to track down possibilities. This can be achieved though in much the same way as a targeted job search, which I wrote about last week.

Essentially this means finding, and contacting, a company you are interested in doing work experience at, and seeing if an arrangement can be made. You could also try asking around family and friends, and your other networks, to see if any opportunities exist.

There are a few things to remember though.

You will need to be flexible, and prepared to fit in with the host workplace’s schedule. Any companies agreeing to provide you with work experience will want it to take place at a time that suits them.

In most instances you will not be paid since you are there to learn, and the host company is in effect doing you a favour, but I have heard of one or two cases where people do get some recompense.

I also know of a few companies that have made very small, ex gratia, cash payments to assist with a work experience person’s travel costs for example. This has been purely at the discretion of the companies in question though, and should neither be expected or requested.

You also need to be mindful of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) regulations, and insurance cover matters, and should check these issues with the host workplace prior to your engagement.

Tomorrow in the second part of this article, I will supply a few tips and some advice for finding, and gaining the most from, a work experience role.