Finding the Parallel Career
This article kicks off our OweYaa blog series where we will bring insights, opinions, and advice to both our military families and growing companies on new ways to achieve career goals, financial stability, better hiring, and greater company growth. OweYaa was founded out of research conducted in veteran unemployment that identified obstacles for service members reentering the civilian job market. With the identification of these obstacles came a new approach to not only providing a competitive edge for service members, but a competitive edge to companies in hiring new talent. We call the new process productive hiring, which we will get into in a later post. However, lets start with today's topic, finding parallel career paths.
So, you have a degree in IT, Communications, Engineering, or maybe you do not have a post high-school degree at all. But you have a skill, you’ve worked in a career field, and you have built great experiences in that field. However, the time has come where you need a new job, and it seems that no one is hiring in the field that you have worked so hard in. Fear not, your skills don’t have to go wasted!
Today, companies are extremely integrated across multiple domains. What I mean by this is that companies need people with backgrounds in fields that may not seem so apparent. Let’s talk the tech industry for a second, more specifically a cyber security consulting firm. This company, let’s call them Company X, specifically focuses in providing IT audits for companies and organizations across America. You immediately think to yourself, well I need to be a coder, security expert, or network specialist to even have a chance at working for Company X. Well I am here to tell you, you don’t!
You see, Company X has many operations that must take place for them to be a successful company. For instance, they need to make sales, they need to manage accounts, they need to engage with current clients, manage their own teams, and so on and so on. Now, with that frame of mind let’s explore some options for a possible candidate. Say the candidate has an IT degree; however, it is from years ago and with as fast as tech moves the degree is nearly outdated. The good news is that although that individual is likely out of the running for an analyst or programming position, their technical background and ability to understand broad IT concepts will likely make them a very marketable candidate for sales, client relations, and management. In other words, parallel careers that can provide you opportunities that you once thought didn’t exist.
Here at OweYaa, we help identify these parallel opportunities and help you get to them. How does it work? We start by identifying your skill sets. We then take those skills and we develop how we can expand their reach in to fields and companies that are relevant but not perfectly inline. Why do we do this? Often our candidates have training that is semi outdated for the field they once were in. However, we are able to take that background and we pair it with a fast paced training program that integrates small-scope internship opportunities. This process enables a candidate to now bolster their background and make themselves extremely valuable to a prospective company.
Why is this?
Looking back at Company X, an employee in their sales department or client relations needs to be able to translate IT terminology and practices in to non-technical terms and communicate that clearly. The candidate’s IT background enables them to understand those concepts, and the fast pipeline of training in sales and communications enables them to tie it all together answering the company’s need, giving the candidate a legitimate shot at being hired.
So how can you put this in to practice? If you do not want to go it alone, please feel free to join us at oweyaa.com. If not, it is as simple as knowing what you are good at, understanding the company’s needs, and building upon your personal skill sets and experiences to meet those needs. Hundreds of American companies hire to solve their problems, if you want to be hired, identify those problems and be their solution!
OweYaa is a platform and service that is helping veterans and military spouses build better careers through an integrated training and internship experience while creating a productive hiring process for growing companies. It was founded out of the need to go beyond just translating military skills into civilian skills and instead provide a platform for veterans and military spouses to showcase their talents to companies. Learn more at OweYaa.com
Luke Jenkins is a member of the Active Duty Military and USMA grad who helped to identify the need for a more integrated process to hiring, especially within the transitioning military community.
