Making a Huge Career Transition? Get Your Story Down

TRANSCRIPT

Let’s say you’ve been in banking or finance and you’re making a pivot to work in an NGO. The thought here is, “Wow, I have all these strengths and skills and talents from my former role and I need to make sense of how they translate to the new role.”

You might be asked, “Why do you want this job?” or “Why do you think this is a right fit for you?” And you need to tell the story of how you went from here to there and why it makes sense.

I’m thinking of a client who is a biomedical engineer and she wanted to get into product sales because she had a particular gift for translating or making sense of complex technical information for lay people so they could make good decisions.

She was also, let’s say… a little bit bored in her work and not really able to bring all of her skills and talents to the table.

Telling those stories requires a certain structure. First you talk about what you were doing and then move into what you were noticing about yourself — like the biomedical engineer — noticing the new skills and talents that were not being fully utilized in your current role.

Next you tell about your decision to make the leap, make the jump, searching out roles that would allow you to bring these different strengths to the party. The next piece you need to make sense of is how all your strengths and talents feed into the new role. Just because you’re making a transition doesn’t mean that your strengths will go dormant or suddenly not be useful.

Doing this actually creates your differentiation—your unique value proposition.

If you are making a transition right now and struggling to make sense of things, start writing your story as if it’s already happened—so you have a story to tell in the interview process.