Hello.
In this video, we're going to be talking about everything you should know or think
about if you are thinking of changing jobs or changing careers.
So that's the topic of the presentation for today.
And I've been invited to give this talk
by my colleague, Dr Amy Imms from the Burn Out project.
Amy specialises as a doctor in coaching other people, including doctors,
but not just doctors, other professionals and people in other
careers who might be experiencing burnout in their job or career.
And Amy every year puts together this really great Thrive symposium.
And I'm participating once again in this symposium.
So this is the first bit of it.
I'm speaking, I'm providing you a quick talk as a preview to the weekend.
And on the weekend I'm going to be doing a workshop for those of you who are
interested in getting into the details of the nitty gritty about what you need
to do if you're thinking about changing careers.
Things like how to look at your CV and review that, how to kind of reposition
yourself, how to think about interviews, et cetera, et cetera.
We'll go into the details in that workshop,
but today's talk is about what you need to know about career changes.
So I'm excited to be participating in this symposium once again,
we're going to talk about changing jobs, everything that you need to know.
Now, a little bit about me.
Some of you may know me
from the Career Doctor YouTube channel on my blog, AdvanceMed.
I am Dr.
Anthony Llewellyn, and I'm the managing director of AdvanceMed.
I run a medical HR coaching and consulting
business, so I've undertaken a few career changes over the years.
My background initially as a doctor was to train as a psychiatrist.
I became a consultant psychiatrist.
I then moved into the area of medical management.
I worked in a kind of a Director of medical services type position.
And then I went into some executive roles in various health organisations,
moved in teaching and academia for a while and then finally set up my own business.
So it is possible to change careers and in my business, yes,
I mainly focus on helping other doctors with job applications and preparing
for job interviews and career coaching, that sort of stuff.
But I do work with other organisations
around things like recruitment and selection, including working with non
doctors, both on the coaching side as well as the business side, for example,
I am about to embark, on a project working with a local
surveying firm around some of their issues from an HR perspective.
So this talk is not just for doctors,
it's for other professionals or people in other trades or careers.
You might be thinking about changing it up.
So what are we going to COVID today is the reasons, firstly,
why you might want to switch jobs or careers, because it's important to think
about what might be the various reasons and that may affect your approach.
Then secondly, I think if you are thinking
about switching a job or career, you do want to think about internal options.
Does your job really have to stay the way that it is staying at the moment?
This is something you can do internally to change things around.
Then we'll talk about how you might go about identifying a new career and then
once you have identified a new career, what the process might look like in terms
of transitioning yourself, reposition yourself and what you can do
in the meantime while you're waiting to take up a new job.
And finally, I think we want to talk about changing a career can be painful.
You're maybe moving away from pain,
but there's going to be some pain along the way, inevitably for you.
So we need to acknowledge that there are some notsogood points about changing your
career or job and how you can manage some of these pain points through the process.
Okay, so what we're going to COVID in this
talk is reasons why you might want to switch jobs or careers,
what might be some of the reasons, because that kind of goes to the process.
And some other things you should think, particularly around internal options,
which is next, does your job really have to stay the way it is?
Other things that you can do within your
job, either to stay in it permanently, to give yourself more fulfilment,
or at least to buy the time while you're transitioning to another career,
then how do you go about identifying a new career for yourself?
What things can you use to do?
And finally, the process of transitioning, how to reposition yourself and what to do
in the meantime while you're waiting to change careers.
And then at the end,
I want to COVID just some of the mostly good aspects for career changes,
reasons why you might want to reconsider, but also things that you need to be aware
of because it's not a painless journey, generally moving from one job to another.
So that's what we want to attempt to COVID in the next 10 minutes or so.
So, reasons why you might want to change your career.
Well, firstly, boredom.
Maybe your job no longer gives you the thrill that you should do.
And that's important to consider because
maybe there are some things you can do to alleviate the boredom.
Maybe your values have changed,
or maybe the values of the organisation you work for you feel have changed.
It's hard to work in a job where you don't feel like you're providing the sort
of value that you want to provide from that job.
Maybe the focus is different.
Maybe you find the job takes too much away
from other things that are important in your life.
Maybe it's a job that requires you to do
a lot of extra hours and that deprives you from the time you want to spend with your
young family or your sporting hobby or other hobbies or that sort of thing.
Maybe it's just not helping you to set
the right priorities in your life, maybe your passion allies elsewhere
and you can see how a lot of these concepts sort of overlink and overlap
maybe and you want to invest more time in that passion and you feel like the jobs
getting in the way, maybe you're just deeply unhappy.
And this is where we get into the concept of moral injury.
Which is about that thing where you feel
like your values are not being met for the job.
But you see bad stuff on a daily basis that makes you feel bad about turning up
to work and there's only it might be a remuneration thing.
Maybe the money is not enough and I think
that's a particularly tricky one to deal with.
I work with doctors and often doctors want to change careers and often when they're
changing your career they're going from a big salary to a not so big salary.
So it's important to kind of consider is it about the remuneration or is there
another way you can set the expectations financially for your life so that the work
you do you feel is valuable and you're not chasing that dollar?
I guess, as I said, it could be these six reasons.
It could be another reason you might want to comment below in the video.
There are other reasons that have led you
to want to change your career and it could be a mixture of any of these.
The first question I would want to put to you is this can your job change?
Are there some internal opportunities
to make things different that can address whatever the reason or reasons it is
that you're thinking you need to undertake a career change?
So here are some thoughts about internal opportunities.
Maybe you can do us a comment away
from your job to another area in the organisation you're working for,
the business that you're working for to do something new, exciting,
something you wanted to do, something that kind of brings back your passion.
Maybe there's some projects within the job that I'm waiting for people to put their
hands up for that could give you some time away from the regular work,
that again gives you some sort of sense of fulfilment reengages you in the work.
Maybe there are some training opportunities that you could be putting
your hand up for, which A would take you away from the regular daily work but also
give you more skills and ability to put your hand up to change the nature of your
job and take on more responsibilities and move it in a different way.
Maybe you can discuss some of these issues at your performance review.
If you have one of those processes in your
business where you talk about things and ambitions and things that you'd like
to do over the next six months or twelve months, whatever the cycle might be.
Maybe it's possible to cut down hours, maybe you can pursue some other things
on the side, but also that relieves some of the pressure.
For example, if we're talking about the job, taking your focus away,
cutting down some hours might give you the amount of time that you want
to contribute to other things that makes you reengage with the work.
Or maybe you've got lots of leave owing,
or you can afford to take some unpaid leave, take a bit of a break from the job.
Probably the last one is probably not going to solve your problem,
though it might bring you back a refresh for a while.
But if the job doesn't change and you've
got problems with it already, it's not likely to change why you're away.
But you can see there are some things that you want to think about before you
jump ship and you want to fully explore these internal options.
Because even if you do decide to move
after you do that, it's going to make it easier for you if you do need to leave.
For example, additional training gives you additional skills, perhaps qualifications.
Cutting down might give you a smooth transition to the new career.
So think about those internal opportunities as either a way of making
the job feel worthwhile again or a transition into the new career.
So let's talk about changing to a new career.
In his book Ikigai the Japanese Secret
to a Long, Happy Life, Hector Garcia, many of you would probably have seen this
little Ben diagram is the thing that shows how you can explore the intersection
of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and what you can be
paid for to come up with this ikigai concept.
Now, I have to say that I understand
that this is very much taking licence from the actual ikigai concept in Japan,
and there is no ikigai Venn diagram in the Japanese concept of ikigai.
But it's a useful exercise to sort
of think through, sort of come up with what you want to do in your life.
But I don't think everyone's going to hit
the Milwaukee guy necessarily in their career.
But if you can be addressing as many
of these things as possible, then that's one way of sort of identifying
where you want to move in terms of your passion.
So maybe using my example of medicine,
and I'm going to use the example of a client that I coached once
in the past who was making a bit of a decision between does she want
to keep working in medicine or does she want to go into real estate?
Because she really enjoyed flipping houses and was good at it.
What does she love about medicine?
She loved the engagement, the talking to people, the seeing successes in patients.
She worked, I think, in a general practise
setting, but she also liked meeting people in the real estate business and helping
people to purchase houses and fixing up things.
So that was what she was good at and what she was passionate about.
And real estate is a profession
in the world, needs housing and you can definitely get paid if you're good for it.
So that was kind of her transition,
but it wasn't as if the skills that she had in medicine were completely different
from the skills that she needed in real estate.
Now, she'd obviously gone off and done
some training because you can't just steal houses without a licence and all that sort
of thing, but she wasn't just going from one career blindly into another.
So how can you identify a new career?
Well, the first thing I think you should do is review your current career first.
What are you good at? What problems can you solve?
Do you like to solve? What do you like in work?
What aspects of the job do you still like or used to like?
Are you a people person? Do you like solving complex problems?
Do you like working in big teams?
Do you prefer working on your own, et cetera, et cetera, and then your network?
So I'm going to come back to networking quite a few times.
Do you know someone similar who has left your business or organisation?
And if so, where did they go? Who picked them up?
What skills were they able to transfer to something else?
And then these are a number of things that you can do to sort of have a look
at what new career might be worthwhile for you.
There are bunches of tests out there that you can take that sort of give you
an indication, in terms of your personality preferences
and other behavioural indicators, what sort of careers you might want to pursue.
With all these concepts,
it's probably worth engaging either a career coach or in some fields,
you can engage a recruiter to help you sort of make some of the decisions
and interpret some of these things like career test.
Review your qualifications.
What careers are your qualifications used in?
For example,
you might have done a teaching certificate, part of your current job now
that might have been to teach within the medical profession,
but if it's a general teaching certificate or certificate in assessment,
I think it's called, you can use it in a lot of other areas that qualification.
Do your research.
What occupations appeal to you, find out more about them.
What industries and companies are you interested in?
Find out more about them and do that,
particularly by speaking to the people in the jobs that appeal to you.
Okay. And then there's a sense that you might
want to this might be a time where you want to engage with a coach.
And again, networking in person and things like LinkedIn can be quite valuable.
You can get lots of insights out of something like LinkedIn.
Now let's talk about generalisability
and being pegged and this is a big issue for many doctors that I work with.
You on your level may struggle to see that your skills are more generalisable
to other areas but also others may struggle to see past your current
professional job in terms of being able to do other jobs because you're kind
of being labelled, in my case as a doctor, that can be a real issue.
Partly the only way to move past that is
some self exploration but also persistence and trying to add additional things
to your resume to make it clear that you aren't just a lawyer or aren't just
an accountant or aren't just a doctor or aren't just a bus driver or aren't just
the hairdresser, whatever your current occupation is.
So transitioning.
Do what you can whilst you can still do that in your own job.
Take advantage of your current job if
you're able to take advantage of training or projects that are available.
Do your research while you're still working up skill at work.
Volunteer if you've got spare time in the areas that you're thinking about.
If possible, do some freelancing or consulting on the site if it's allowed.
And this all leads back into you may want to cut back your hours to be able to do
some of this extracurricular stuff leading you into a new career that may then make
you pause and think well, I need to cut back on expenses
and that probably is not a bad thing because you may get lucky.
But in most cases when you're
transitioning from one job to another, you're starting at a runglow.
Even if you're setting up your own job, there's going to be a lot of expenses
and you're not going to be setting up your own job as part of your own business.
You're going to not going to be able
to charge probably at the rate that you're used to being paid for.
So it's going to create a bit of a financial impact on you.
So cutting back on your remuneration
by virtue of cutting back your hours is probably not necessarily a bad thing.
It gives you a little bit of scope if that's something you can afford to do.
But I would say one thing if you're
starting to sort of have 1ft outside of your job and 1ft in it,
you need to be careful that you're still doing your job well and performing well
and that your managers are happy with your performance.
If it's come to a point where you're
really not engaged, you're just turning up, that's not so good.
You need to be able to rely on your
current employer to say that you are a good worker.
From a reference point of view
and perspective, you definitely don't want a bad feeling when you leave that business
or organisation coming behind you when you're applying for new jobs.
So you do need to still put in the effort in your current job.
Otherwise probably that is the point where
you should be thinking about packing it in.
So let's talk now about repositioning and overhauling your approach.
So obviously things like your CV or resume will need to be done over again,
the way you prepare for interviews is going to be challenging because you're
probably used to applying for jobs within your occupational profession and talking
about the skills within your occupational profession.
Now you want to be able to talk about
transferable skills but not again get typecast as a lawyer or a doctor or
a headrest or a bus driver or whatever it might be.
So you need to have other stories to tell as well to show that you've got lots
of skills matching the needs of the job that you're interviewing for.
And of course, you may not be applying
for jobs, you might be just going out there to create your own job and that's
okay and that gives you a lot of freedom and scope.
But it also can be daunting.
It's the ultimate way of career changing
in more ways than one because you have to prove yourself to the universe
that what you're doing is worthy of remuneration in some way.
So we talked about living some not so good
aspects to changing jobs and we do have to manage your expectations.
I think the key thing here is a pay cut is likely.
Money is not going to be as good moving from one job to another job,
particularly initially as you recline the ladder in terms of seniority.
And that often surprises people when I talk to them about this issue.
For example, I'm involved in a few doctors groups and often in those groups doctors
will come along saying I'm feeling burnt out in my Murphy medicine job,
I'd like to move to outside of medicine or a non clinical job, what can I do?
And then it's paid at the same level.
Well, I'm sorry, you're very good at what
you do and you're being paid for doing that.
You have to prove that you've got
the skills to be remunerated at the same level in another area and you may not
necessarily have those skills straightaway.
So knowing very few people actually care
initially about your successes in other areas, you have to reestablish
that credibility again, even if you're developing your own job,
going out on your own and setting up your own business.
And so it's important to be humble
and to be open to learning from others, even people more junior to you in terms
of age, but actually more mature and senior to you in terms of their
knowledge and understanding of the career that you're wanting to embark upon.
Finally, what should you not do when changing careers?
Well, a few things.
Don't do things quickly, don't resign abruptly.
Don't do no research about the other options that are available to you.
Don't quit out of stress or
in an emotional moment get some coaching, get some counselling if needed,
if things are becoming really bad for you and do it in a clear head,
in a rational way, and definitely do not burn bridges the way out the door.
Tell them what you really think about
their job or their industry or their business that is going to harm you
and backfire on you down the track when you apply for other jobs.
And as I said, I think this is a perfect
opportunity, your time in your life, to think about engaging with a career
coach, someone who's got some experience in this area that can help you out,
a mentor, a wise person along the way to help you in this process.
So that is everything you need to know about changing a career or job.
If you want to get in contact with me, there are my details.
There's a QR code for you as well.
I will, of course be appearing on the weekend, on the Saturday,
and we'll go into a lot more detail about preparing for a career change from CV
to interview with all the other things in between.
And if you're watching this on YouTube and enjoying this video,
please subscribe and turn on notifications and I will see you in another video.
Bye for now.