Pivoting...

One of the most common things with millennials and Gen Z is shifting careers and changing jobs. While employees offer many additional benefits as a retention strategy, younger employees are harder to retain for more than a period of 2 years. This can be attributed to various things- relocation, better growth prospects, work/life balance etc.

Pivoting, whether moving to a different sector, but within the profession, ie an Auditor leaving a government auditing job for another auditing post in the private sector, or a commercial lawyer going into public interest litigation, or whether you are shifting to a completely different profession – an administrator going into marketing, or a Sales person going into medicine (unusual but not impossible)- it can be overwhelming and requires lots of effort.

Each sector has its ways and intricate details that require accumulated knowledge to give you the best output. While education can teach you so much, there are some skills that you can only learn through on-the-job experience. And one of the best ways to gain a wide range of experience, I have learned, is by working for a small organization.

Small organizations often have overlapping responsibilities where you find that for example, the HR officer also fulfils some finance responsibilities. You are often given additional responsibilities, over and above your main job- this is how you get exposed to various positions and skills. It is also a great way to learn about the industry in which you work. You are more likely to learn about litigation while working for a legal organization with a team of 10 than you would learn in a big law firm with hundreds of employees with streamlined roles and responsibilities.

I have worked in Public service, civil society and now in Business- one of the most consistent things throughout my career is the transferable skills such as business writing, critical reasoning, analytical thinking, and general people skills. The latter is most important because it is inherent in most jobs. If you can work with people you can collaborate and this means that whatever skills you lack may be complemented by other team members. Teamwork also means that you are all collectively contributing to the same objective and in most cases will assist each other to achieve the bottom line. Employers find this very valuable.

While my roles have been similar in all my career, I have managed to use some of the acquired skills such as project coordination, proposal writing and corporate governance to pivot into consultancy and freelancing. These are completely different to what I have studied and not something I thought I would end up in given my initial work experience. But here I am, boldly calling myself a specialist and confident to talk about things I learnt on the job, and not in any lecture hall. And no, I’m not underrating education because, for every skill I have learnt on the job, I have gone on to at least take a short online cause on the subject. Don’t sleep on those MOOCs. There’s a well of knowledge to help build your skill set as well as legitimize the knowledge acquired “informally”.

So- in case you are not happy with where you are and want to do a full-on 360 with your career- I say GO FOR IT! But before you do, build your profile, learn as many skills as possible and then go fetch the career you’re dreaming of right now.