⚖️ What are the paths for a career shift?

I am a bit delayed this week, thought I had scheduled this!
If you’ve been find this newsletter useful, consider sharing it with a friend/colleague by asking them to subscribe here.

This is an ongoing series on career transitions, attempting to draw concrete suggestions from an abstract, nonlinear journey. Read the previous editions on the blog.

You’ve identified a field you’re interested in and have researched what skills you need to develop for this. Now what? You’re back to the chicken and egg dilemma where you need experience to get a job but you also need a job to get experience.

What are the paths for breaking out of this? Some suggestions-

• Horizontal Shift: Find a job within your current domain but in an organisation that has opportunities for the role you are interested in. And you make a horizontal shift to your function of interest over a period of time.

  Tip: Show up for your role to the best of your ability and build trust with people.

• Bridge Role: This can be a role which might have some similarities with your role of interest or might give you some exposure to skills you’ll need for your main goal- enough to make a case for your potential on your resume or while reaching out to people.

• Proof of Skills: Take up a personal project to demonstrate your skills. In the world of AI, this has become more and more accessible and the general expectation. For instance, interested in marketing? Make a couple of websites on Lovable. For product management, checkout the projects people have built on Lovable/Bolt/Replit and make one of your own.

What worked for me?

Domain expertise in Psychology was helpful in firstly finding a bridge role and then landing a full time role in product as these were both mental health companies. A bit of serendipity sprinkled over a lot of hustle to learn and demonstrate a proof of my abilities eventually lead to where I wanted to be.

It was, of course, more complex than this simplistic explanation. I’ll share more about that next week.

But also a reality check- landing a role is just the beginning. In the world of AI, things change rapidly and one needs to adapt to that.

Until then,
Suvrita