3 Ways to Build Confidence After a Career Change
Congrats, you’ve done it! It’s the first day at your new job in your new career, and you couldn’t be more thrilled to embark on a new journey. But after the thrill of the first week passes, reality sets in and you begin to understand that getting a new job is only the start of making a successful career change. In fact, the majority of succeeding in making the transition is finding a way to not only exist in your new role, but to thrive in it.
After leaving a 5-year career in technical project management to venture into software engineering a year ago, I felt these emotions acutely as I grappled with my own self-doubt in trying to find ways to excel in my new role. It’s difficult to feel secure when you’re at a new company and working with completely different people, especially when you’re in a role you’ve never done before. Below are three tactics I employed to slowly boost my confidence in the first few months as a software engineer.
One: Dive Into the Company’s Mission and Values.
While you’re building up new skills related to your new role, spend time learning the context surrounding your company and team. Who are your customers? What are their needs and problem areas? What are the key metrics your company measures? What are the quarterly/yearly goals your team is working on?
Context building makes your work more meaningful by allowing you to know how your projects affect larger goals and outcomes. According to a study by Imperative, 73% of purpose-oriented employees are satisfied in their jobs, but satisfaction falls to 64% when employees do not feel a meaningful connection to their work. The feeling of purpose you get from context building is not only important to your personal satisfaction, but also to your company’s growth. The same study found that 85% of purpose-led companies showed positive growth, compared to 42% of non-purpose led companies which showed a drop in revenue. Feeling like the work you’re doing is important is key to building confidence, and context is integral to that.
At Tictail, I felt a heightened sense of responsibility and ownership when I met the creators behind some of the brands on our marketplace. Putting faces behind the names of our customers helped me know that all the work I do affects the lives and livelihoods of real people. The empathy stemming from meeting our users enables me to take a customer centric approach to daily problem solving.
Two: Set Goals Early and Often.
If you’re like me, nothing beats the satisfaction of crossing something off of a long to-do list. So why not treat the ramp-up process as a checklist? Sit with your manager or a peer, and come up with a list of reasonable expectations for the first 3–6 months of your role. These tasks could range from something fun and simple, like get coffee with one person from every team, to something more related to your job responsibilities, like make a short internal presentation at the end of 6 months about what you’ve learned.
As a programmer, my milestones were code related, for example, make one contribution to both frontend and backend codebases, or write a PR that receives no code-style related comments in its review. When I’m overwhelmed with how much I have yet to learn, I boost my mood by looking back to my crossed off goals and remembering how far I’ve come. Additionally, this list of accomplishments is always useful come performance reviews, as I can clearly remember and articulate the ways that I’ve succeeded and grown over time.
Three: Contribute Where You Can.
If you’re feeling uncomfortable with your progress at the start of a career-change, take stock of all that you already bring to the table and find ways to leverage those skills to make meaningful change. One of the hardest parts of my first few weeks at Tictail was feeling like I wasn’t pushing out enough code and knowing that it was going to take time to become both self-sufficient and efficient. To combat this feeling, I tried to figure out what I could do with the skills I had developed in the past. Since I knew how to write SQL, I wrote some queries to try and help identify cool new brands that had recently launched on our platform. When I noticed that some of the products I “discovered” through this query were featured on our Instagram or being sold at our brick-and-mortar, I felt an immense sense of accomplishment for a contribution completely unrelated to the expectations of my role.
At the very least, an asset every new employee carries is a fresh set of eyes. Never underestimate the power of asking ‘Why do we do X this way?’. In explaining why things are the way they are, your teammates are forced to take a step back from the task at hand. Sometimes, day-to-day tasks make it difficult to look at the bigger picture and ask how we can do things differently, and this is a thought process that a new employee can easily incite in by simply asking ‘Why?’.
With Americans quitting their jobs at the quickest rates since 2001, job and career changes are extremely prevalent. So If you’re one of the 3 million Americans quitting their jobs each month, be assured that you’re not alone. It’s a long road, but if you work at building your confidence, you’re sure to come out with a lot of wonderful learnings, and maybe even a bright new career.
As for me, I couldn’t be happier with my choice to switch careers. It took a while to feel comfortable with my new responsibilities, but after getting promoted in just under a year, I’m more sure than ever that I’m on the right track. However, the greatest part of successfully switching careers is the confidence I gained in knowing that if and when I choose to embark on this journey once again, I can do it and do it well.
