Successful Career Change Advice (from Investors.com)

Investors.com - Lessons From Job Shifts

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Lessons From Job Shifts

By Adelia Cellini Linecker
Posted 06/03/2009 05:05 PM ET


Gone are the days when you spent your entire career with one company. Today's work force expects and seeks career changes. The lure of opportunities pushes people to accept challenges and turn them into learning experiences.
Career changes offer chances to land skills, says Kathryn Hall, whose career took her from lawyer to ambassador to winemaker.

Here's what you can learn:

• Assets count. "There are skills that you learn in one venue and they help you in the next setting," Hall told IBD.

Drawing from her experience as a lawyer, Hall tweaked her negotiating skills to suit her needs as U.S. ambassador to Austria. "I had a personal role, a business management role and a policy role," she said of her 1997-2001 tenure in Vienna. "A good negotiator understands the person you negotiate with. You need to know where they are coming from and know their culture."

• Challenges spur growth. New positions mean adjustments. Hall moved from a private law practice to the public arena when she ran for assistant city attorney in Berkeley, Calif., in the early 1970s.

The campaign taught her resilience. "Running for office is really like having psychoanalysis in front of millions of people," Hall said. "The challenge was learning to adapt to criticism and to recognize that it's not personal."

• Dreams change. Most people are destined for various work, says Pamela Skillings, author of "Escape From Corporate America."

"If you're like most people, you have a complex collection of interests, talents and priorities," she wrote. "At the same time, as you grow and evolve and your life circumstances change, your criteria for what makes a true calling may also change."

Changing jobs makes you more flexible to explore new areas.

• Confidence builds. While the first transition might cause anxiety, subsequent changes get easier.

"Have confidence that the most important skills for your new job are skills you have likely developed in your prior career, such as discipline, judgment, time management and interpersonal skills," Hall said.

• Open minds thrive. Don't let experience block growth. A career change can teach you to accept different ways of doing things.

"Be ready to learn new skills, and don't be hesitant to admit what you don't understand," Hall said.

• Research is key. Be smart about where you make the leap. Changing careers into a dead end will prove costly and demoralizing. "Look to growing industries like green products and services or health care," Hall said. "Don't wait for the business world to go back to normal. It won't. We are facing a widespread recalibration throughout the private sector. Look for new normals."

• Passion is a guide. This is a tough time to make career changes, Hall says. If you do something you love, you'll be so much better at it and you'll be a happier person.

Pick a career that you love or a job that leads to that career because "that's where your talents are," said Hall, owner of Hall Wines and who returned to the family business of running vineyards in Mendocino, Calif. "I always knew that someday I'd return to the business of winemaking, because it has been a part of my life ever since I can remember."



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