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3 Ways to Navigate Through an Alternate Career Path

You had a perfect career – money, position, growth trajectory & satisfaction (not in that order necessarily). You also chose your passion as your career, which only added to your overall happiness & well-being. Then suddenly came along a global epidemic, and it changed everything for you. Your industry suffered a significant blow, and so did your career. Well, welcome to global realisation!

Millions have been affected globally in the last seventy-five days, both professionally & otherwise. At the beginning of January this year, according to the UN, at least half a billion people were working fewer hours already.

The U.S alone has over 30 million people unemployed/seeking assistance from the government. ILO says that at least 1 in 5 young people are unemployed globally. 24.3% of people in India are jobless due to the novel coronavirus.

Navigate Through an Alternate Career Path

There is a huge possibility that many professionals, who have given their lives to a particular skill, or line of education, will be tested. Starting fresh is always challenging, especially if you have given fifteen-twenty years to one specific line of work. Where will you start? What will you do?

Use Your Personality Traits to Find Your Next Gig

There is no better way to start than to use your personality to find your next act. It doesn’t mean the next role has to be a nine-five job, and it can be freelance work, consulting, or a new business idea. This exercise doesn’t have to be rocket science.

You don’t necessarily have to look at Myer’s Briggs type indicator or the Big Five good traits worldwide. List down all the traits you think you have in you, and run them past your friends & family to revise that list. These positive adjectives can set a broad base for you to choose from various options.

For example, you could be friendly, creative, confident & helpful. Using these traits, look at roles & industries, for example, marketing, social work, and consulting. The pay, in the beginning, might not be what you were used to in the pre-pandemic world, but you may have just succeeded in a critical transitioning phase.

Ancillary Work Roles

Ancillary work roles will be the next big thing, in careers, in the post-pandemic world. Imagine your last profile. Right down all the touch points from other roles you interacted with the most every day. Now eliminate all those roles that are unrelated to your education & experience.

However, keep those that require similar skillsets/personality traits. This revised list is the potential future line of work that you may pursue. The most significant advantage of this strategy is that you change the tracks, but all roads still lead to home!

For example, before leaving the last job, a salesperson interacted daily with hundreds of work profiles, both internally & externally. For example, marketing, finance, IT, operations, procurement, HR, and analytics. He can safely eliminate IT, ops, finance, HR & analytics.

The chances of him getting into marketing within the same industry would be high, and getting to the other side of the table to procurement will be probable. Ancillary sales can also include different segments within the same line of work. For example, a hotel sales associate can enter hotel club loyalty sales, which a leading outsourced company runs.

Newer Realities, Newer Roles

There will be multiple roles that will be redundant, undoubtedly. However, the silver lining is that there will be equally newer realities related to work roles. For example, companies may have benefited from this pandemic, even though this could sound weird. E-commerce, pharmaceuticals, companies selling hygiene products like hand sanitisers, etc.

There will be newer roles due to social distancing – for example, more emphasis on digital payments, hence the need for more software developers and business development teams to sell these products. Getting into this will be like catching on the tide; however, will it not be easy. These could mean learning new skills & upgrading yourself, and it could also mean going against your traits, passion, education & experience. Starting with no.

Conclusion

If you are at a career crossroads, you will have to choose one of these methods to navigate with an educated risk and hedge it appropriately. Whichever method you choose, just remember to keep moving forward, which beats everything.

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