Top Mistakes When Changing Careers

Long gone is the era in which we’d start a job in a company in our mid to late teens or early 20s and retire from the company 40 to 50 years later. Today, people ‘jump ship’ all of the time and this is often within their chosen career but to another company who may be better placed to offer them more money or, more often than not, a better chance of career advancement. However, in a world where many people choose to also change their career, it’s important that this is carefully planned, managed and thought through. Career changes have positively transformed the lives of many thousands of people but if you get it wrong, it can turn out to be a nightmare. This article summarises some of the most common errors people can tend to make when it comes to deciding on a career change.

Too Much Emphasis Placed On Money

All of us have varying degrees of what we want in terms of our ‘standard of living’. For some, they can be perfectly happy working in a remote part of the world for little money and with few basic luxuries whilst for others, they’ll choose to define themselves by the type of house and car they own, the expensive holidays they take and by other possessions. The most important aspect of choosing a career change is to focus on the overall impact it will have on you as a person and your overall quality of life.

The problem arises when people determine their ‘quality of life’ to be measured purely in terms of their financial wealth. They’ll then seek an opportunity to follow a career path where the potential for increasing their salary becomes the most alluring aspect which can cloud their judgement. They’ll often find they’ll follow a new career path which doesn’t suit them, perhaps they’ll feel out of their depth, they may be faced with additional work pressures they didn’t have before and didn’t want to have and their quality of life will diminish to such an extent that no amount of money will make up for that.

Failure To Look Before You Leap

Some people become so sick and tired of their own job that they simply want to get out if it at any cost. They might have some vague inkling about what they want to do next but haven’t really researched it too much. Therefore, if you’re considering a career change, it’s important that you look before you leap.

Where you have ‘vague inkling’ about what you might want to do, spend some time researching the profession and what it entails. Do you need extra qualifications and if so, do you have the necessary time (and perhaps money behind you) to gain them whilst still working in your current role? What about the nature of your preferred profession? Is it a growing profession and are there plenty of opportunities? How about lifestyle? You might well be choosing a career path that will both simplify and improve your quality of life but this might mean less money. Do your current commitments allow you to do that at present?

Too Much Reliance On External Help

Often people who have reached a certain level of achievement within a chosen field will feel that they’ve attained a number of cross-transferable skills which will enable them to switch careers easily and, indeed, this can be the case and many recruitment companies and so called ‘headhunters’ will place great emphasis on their ability to find you a better job and a more suitable career path. After all, it’s also in their own interests to do that. However, whether you’re in a £50k a year job or just starting out, too many people make the common mistake of simply registering with a few agencies and then they just sit back on their laurels waiting for the phone to ring. This is a big mistake. Whilst agencies, consultants and the like can often help in getting you a start in a new career, many’s the time where people have jumped ship after an agency has got them a ‘new start’ only to find out they’re even worse placed than they were previously. Therefore, it’s still important you manage your entire career change. Go and speak to people who work in your preferred industry and find out more about it. Not only will this give you a better idea of whether or not it’s for you, you’ll also be ‘networking’ at the same time and it will be these kinds of relationships you’ll be able to forge which are more likely to lead to you getting the career change you’re hoping to achieve.

It can be very frustrating to reach a point in your current job where you’re no longer getting any satisfaction. And whilst a career change can open up some wonderful life-changing opportunities, it’s also filled with its share of heartbreak stories too and so it’s by avoiding these common mistakes and through careful planning that you’ll eventually find the right career change for you at the right time if that’s what you intend to do. The important thing is not to jump ship too quickly as once you’ve burned your bridges, you may not be able to go back.

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