The art of career pivoting…look before you leap

The word pivot has become a hot buzzword in startup tech circles. However, long before I knew anything about the Valley, pivoting was a move finessed by basketball players. Some of the great post move footwork of the 90’s big men created enough wonderment that the word became synonymous with something magical in my mind.

Yet there is a likeness between pivoting on the hardwood and startup pivoting. In both worlds, the founder and the ball player survey their playing field for the best opportunities to position themselves and execute key features of their game plan to gain advantage quickly. Career pivoting follows a similar premise.

Career pivoting is moving from one career track to the next. A banker turned software developer or marketer turned scientist are both extreme cases, and are more like cutting across the Interstate than merely switching lanes. However, a pivot doesn’t necessarily mean jumping from one distinctive professional field to the next. A pivot can also be a much slighter shift where a lot of experience from the first act can be carried over to the next such as a creative designer turned marketer or a journalist turned speechwriter.

In startup vernacular, pivoting is a soul-searching quest to find what works – that thing that promises to fuel their engine of growth. As professionals, we sort of traverse the same path and can adapt a similar approach to our professional lives. Pivoting might help us discover new ways to fuel our own engine of growth and get us to greener pastures quicker.

Many startups pivot their way to success. Their process is iterative and involves taking tremendous risks usually against the admonitions of conventional thinking. The same is true of our career. Success in our professional lives might mean charting a different course, developing new skills, and going after what we truly value despite all the warning signs.

There’s a wrong and a right way to pivot. The outcome can end up a crapshoot either way you take it. However, there are some techniques that can increase our odds for success and tilt the outcome in our favor. Here are some things to consider if you are looking to change lanes.

Research Research Research 

There’s a right time! I believe the concept of perfect time exists only to procrastinators. However, when it comes to changing careers, timing is everything. We have to be darn near methodical about it. Making a successful career pivot is never an easy transition. We will need time to explore the new area and evaluate whether it’s really what we want to do or what we had chalked it up to be. We also need time to assess whether the time is right to make the leap and investigate if this new career path poses some kind of existential crisis. Going down this checklist may help us avoid crash landing into some deserted career field.

Focus is the focus. Knowing where we want to go is the first step. Being certain we want to go there may serve us well in the long run. We often get the feeling like we are in the wrong job and get antsy about trying something new. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do something more meaningful or exciting if that’s what we believe will give our career the kick in the butt it deserves. However, the problem is we don’t always know what that “something” is and we figure we should just make a leap and see where we land. Parachutes don’t come with an abort feature. Once we make the jump, we have to live with the consequences.

It’s bad enough that the wrong move might send us back packing to our old job like a puppy dog with its tail between its legs, but to return feeling defeated may further set us back. According to Jody Miller, Founder/CEO of Business Talent Group, we need to match our career objectives with our life cycle, in doing so, we let where we are financially and emotionally set the stage for our second act.

Repurpose

Check your skill inventory. There’s simply no way to make a successful career-pivot without first taking stock of our current skills. This is one of the reasons timing is important. Perhaps there are opportunities to replenish our skills on the job before entertaining a career a move. We put the wheels in motion by researching the skills required to secure a safe career landing. In most cases, we pick up both soft and hard skills throughout our career that are useful across professions. Some employers may even place a higher premium on industry knowledge over specific skill set which creates a great opportunity to leverage those experiences.

The idea that we have to toss out old skills or experiences we’ve picked up over the years because we are switching career lanes is pure nonsense. No doubt, pivoting requires scoping out the new area and evaluating the skills needed to make the move reasonably painless. Yet career pivoting is much more about our current knowledge base than we think. It’s also about our ability to seek out the right career opportunities that will allow us to parlay the right skills and build on top of them.

Retool

Putting your skills to work through volunteering or internship. Having the right skills is great but experience trumps everything, right? So how do we gain experience doing something we’ve never done? Simple, we volunteer our time. Non- profit organizations are often resource constraint and may not always have the ability to hire additional help for a new project or initiative. This is where you come in. Offering assistance with tasks related to the area in which we want to gain experience in exchange for shadowing the job can provide both meaningful and valuable experience.

You don’t have to ‘quit your day job’ either. We can pivot our career without quitting our day job. It’s quite normal to love where we work but hate what we do. In fact, many companies have job rotation programs that allow employees to spend short periods working in different areas of the organization to promote experience and variety. Frankly, having the opportunity to move your skills to a new career within the same organization is the best of both worlds. The upside in this situation is we get to stay with a company we enjoy working for. Plus, our career growth takes a softer blow since we may be able to make a relatively lateral move into the new area based on the ability to transfer knowledge from one area of the organization to the next.

Know thyself. Change is uncomfortable. Our brain feeds off comfort and stability. Even Abraham Maslow would argue that not having those basic needs satisfied may stymie our desire to “self-actualize.” Career pivoting may require us to start from ground floor and take the stairs back up. Very few people are willing to place such a bet especially if they are a long way into their career and are fearful of the outcome. Pivoting is not for everyone. It’s not like bungee jumping where you just want to try it at least once and get it out of your system.

The people who want to switch career lanes are not always bored with work or hate their manager or seeking better financial well-being. They are usually people who have realized they are heading in the wrong direction or are uninspired by the work they do despite their success. According to Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, career pivoters seek the deep personal connection that exists between WHAT they do and WHY they do it.

My mother used to always say, “boy, look before you leap.” But being the adventurous kid I was growing up, I would leap anyway and sure enough there were enough hospital visits to prove she was always right. While there is very little chance that you will break any bones like me on your career trek, the lesson still rings true. When you are changing career lanes, keep your eyes on the road ahead but check your mirrors please.