How to Advance your Career and land the job you want
I spent most of my working life feeling pretty contented. The work I did was within my capability, my workplaces were comfortable and the people were friendly. I was challenged, without being overwhelmed. This contentment lasted for the first 10–15 years of my career, but at that point, something started to change. The work I was doing lost some of its challenge, and I started to look around for pathways I might take into more senior or more specialised roles.
This will probably be familiar to many people reading this; and in your own case your desire for change may have happened much earlier than mine — for many people even 3–5 years in one role becomes stale or boring, or perhaps you simply feel that you have more to offer than your current role can provide.
The problem is that moving up or out (up the ladder or out into a different role) can be challenging, and in fact the challenge seems to increase the longer you have been in the same role. You start to become typecast into your current role — this will present itself as people saying (or thinking) “oh yeah Sarah, she’s a good accountant, but I couldn’t imagine her being a manager” — these assumptions are usually based on very little, but they can be pervasive.
If, like me you feel that your job is not fulfilling, or not making full use your abilities, then there are things you can do to increase your likelihood of finding that new role — whether it’s with your current employer or not.
In my experience, the best way to move into a new role is to first become that role. In contrast to the traditional method, whereby you acquire the role and then learn how to do it, I am suggesting that you learn the role first, and then land the job. By the time you have the title, you are already qualified and have practical experience.
How to pursue your new role
1. Set your direction
Once you have made the decision that you need a change, the first thing to do is to decide what that change looks like. Are you looking to move up or out? Moving up refers to taking the next logical next step up your current corporate ladder. If you want to move up within your current organisation, then you probably already know the person whose job you want.
Moving out means moving into a role that is not part of your current organisation, or one that may not be in your current speciality. In this scenario you could try to make the case to your employer for introducing a new role, or else (the easier option) look at finding your preferred role somewhere else.
2. Explore your target role
Your next step is to make sure you understand what your target role entails. At the same time, make sure you really do want this role; some management roles involve long hours and being available out-of-hours too. Make sure that your target role fits with your lifestyle and family.
There is no better way to prepare yourself for a new role than to talk to someone who is already doing it. Extroverts in the class — go out and talk to people, attend meetups or seminars, and gather as much information as you can. Introverts, this will be tougher for you, but there is a lot you can discover through online research and question/answer forums. Sites like LinkedIn also have mentor programs where you can ask professionals for advice — I have used these resources myself, and they can be very insightful (not to mention the benefit of extending your network and making new contacts).
3. Learn the trade
Once you are happy with your choice, you will now want to start learning how to actually perform the role. There are a great deal of online resources you can use, these include formal online training courses, blog posts from experts, and example deliverables/outputs from people actually doing that job.
Spend some time understanding the processes associated with your desired role — what are the typical inputs to the role? What are the core processes? What are the outputs? What are the typical KPIs that you will be held to account by? Do you feel capable of performing this role?
It might help to draw out the role as a diagram, with each of the responsibilities as a separate box; use an example Position Description to draw these responsibilities from. Once you have these on the page, try to imagine yourself being responsible for these things — would you feel comfortable managing a budget for example? How much do you know about this process? Use your best judgement to score yourself from 0-5 (0 = i’m out of my depth, 3 = I can do this with practice, and 5 = I can do this in my sleep!) for each responsibility. Once you have done this, you have developed a pretty good learning pathway towards your new role!
For everything you scored below 3, make a conscious effort to not only learn the subject matter, but actually practice doing it — for example practice drawing up a budget, and then updating it or adjusting it based on money being spent, or the budget being adjusted mid-year. If you can, find someone who already does this as part of their job — ask for some of their time to mentor you, or to review your practice work.
Use fictional scenarios to walk yourself through a particular project or initiative that you might be expected to perform. If you have contacts from your network or mentors, ask them to review your work and your thinking — they will be able to provide honest feedback in a safe environment.
4. Practice the trade
Once I had decided on my own target role, one of the most effective things I did was to start doing the work for real. Quite how you do this will depend on your current organisation, and your supervisor or manager. Have an honest talk with them and explain that you are looking to learn more about a particular role that you would like to move into someday. Even having this conversation will put you on your manager’s ‘radar’ in case a new opportunity does arise.
Explain that you would like to start performing this new role in small parts alongside your current role — this will give you tangible experience with a real world organisation. You may need to make a business case for your request (ie. how will this add value to the organisation?). Hopefully your research from previous steps will help you to make this case. The practice work you did previously can now be put to real world use — whether or not your deliverables end up being used by the business is actually secondary, there is great benefit to performing work against a living breathing business, where things are not always as black-and-white as they are in the textbooks and educational courses.
In some cases, your manager may even be willing to alter your job title to reflect the one you actually want. Of course this may not mean a pay rise (since you are just a trainee, at this stage), but it gives you valuable commercial experience and a new job title to add to your CV. Your new job title demonstrates advancement within your company which can be useful to catch the eye of potential future employers. Make sure you update your CV and job title on employment sites too, since you will start to show up in searches made by recruiters for the very job you want to move into.
5. Present your best self
As mentioned above, you can sometimes become typecast in your current organisation. As such you may need to re-invent your work “self” in order to be considered for progression. As suggested, having a discussion with your line manager can help with this, since they may gain a new perception of you once you demonstrate your ambition.
Failing that, you can always start again with a new organisation, where you can invent a new self from scratch.
Whichever option you choose, you need to start presenting yourself as if you already have the job you want. This does not mean suddenly turning up dressed like the monopoly guy (top hat, suit and monocle), but rather it means contributing to discussions at a level above where you are currently at. As you start to learn more about your target role, you will start have be able to contribute to higher level discussions. Ask to be invited to meetings that someone in your target role would attend. For example strategic planning meetings or one of the many committees that meet regularly. Even if you just sit and observe, you will learn a lot more about how things work.
If you are responsible for producing documents such as reports or presentations, try to bring them up a level in terms of your business viewpoint. What do I mean by this? Find a copy of your corporate strategy, and and other derived strategies (eg. some businesses have a separate marketing strategy, or digital strategy). Use this information to support the reports you are writing — take every opportunity to identify the areas which align to, support, or perhaps don’t support your organisation’s strategy. Make note of the external drivers to your organisation and how they might impact your business (for example, falling oil prices, surge in online retail etc) — you can get this information by following/subscribing to business news sources. This will start to demonstrate a level of thinking that is broader than your own role and department.
6. Explore the market
Keep an eye on the job market, read PDs, apply for jobs, go for interviews, speak with people who have that role. You will experience rejection, and you will receive criticism. Take it all onboard, remember that you are still a trainee in this new role, and you will be competing with other people who have more experience than you. learn from everything you experience and accept the negatives and criticisms, use this information to add to your personal learning roadmap.
One of the most valuable experiences of my career came from a couple of rejections I had, while trying to move from one role to another too soon — looking back I was nowhere near ready, but I did manage to land a couple of interviews, and I did write down and take onboard the feedback and criticism I received — I used this to direct me as to what I needed to do next.
One great piece of advice given to me was “don’t be afraid to move ‘sideways’”. You won’t always be able to move from your current position to your ideal role in one step. However you can take career steps that will ultimately add value and bring you closer to your goal. Even the same type of role in a different organisation provides valuable experience and opportunity for development. Moving around a little also widens your network, which means you are now on the radar of both your new and old colleagues.
I occupied the same role for 9 years before I moved jobs for the first time. I wish I had done this sooner! It turned out that the exposure to different companies, processes and people was the single biggest contributor to my career development and maturity in my profession. Different work environments teach you different ways of doing things, and provide you with new challenges and problems to overcome — you will broaden your knowledge, learn new skills and observe different ways of working.
7. Use your networks
I cannot stress this enough, especially for people living in smaller cities where the job market is naturally smaller. In these environments it is common for positions to be filled through networks or nepotism, in fact a lot of senior roles will never be publicly advertised. Find people who work in your desired industry, and ask for a coffee catch up. You don’t need to be obvious or overt about it, people will always ask you how your work is going as a matter of routine conversation — so just causally mention that you’re looking to move into a new role — you have planted a seed, and you never know who this person might be talking to later down the road.
All my most recent job changes came about through people in my network, and in every case there would not have been a single job advert published. The old adage has some weight — “it’s not what you know, but who you know” (although I personally think what you know does matter a bit!).
Keep Going
Finding and keeping a good job has perhaps never been more difficult. Even if you do everything we talked about, there are no guarantees.
What I will tell you is to have patience, and see every opportunity as a step forward. The time it took from setting my direction to landing my ideal job was well over 4 years — this is no reason to feel disheartened though — I was taking a big step out of my comfort zone, and I gained a ton of valuable experience from the work I did within those 4 years.
I will end on an important point. Just because you have landed your dream job, does not have to mean the end for your career development. This might be what you want right now, but people do change over time. Your interests and priorities often change, as does your life situation, and you never know what direction you might want to take in future.
