#2: Analyze the Gap
We have seen in the previous step how to define your new career. There is a high chance that it lies out of your comfort zone. To be successful in this new career, you thus need to understand what separates you from mastering your potential new job.
Skills area to consider
While every job is different, we can organize your audit around these areas:
Technical skill
Many jobs require specific technical skills to be successful. Identifying then is crucial since they are the basics to be successful in your new career. For example knowing SQL is a must have for any analyst.
Technology/tools
Are there any tools that are standards in the industry and that you will have to work with? Knowing this landscape and clarifying how hard it is to master these tools help you identify where to focus you training.
Industry knowledge
Let’s say you want to work in the nuclear industry. You will want to know about the major players in that sector, the buyers and suppliers landscape (if any), the jargon of this industry as well as its recent history. This context is particularly important during interviews. You don’t want to answer the question “Can you cite our main competitors?” with a long silence.
Team Management
Will your new career require you to manage a team? If yes, which size? Will you manage individual contributors or managers and leaders? Is your team located in the same location or not? Is it composed of similar roles or is it cross-functional? All these questions allow you to understand if you have the past experience to handle this role. If not. you will need to up-skill your management as you will meet a very different setup.
Project Management
Managing projects on your own or projects involving many teams involve different skills and knowledge. Working with Agile methodology cannot be improvised. Do not expect that you can master this part of your future work and make sure to understand the norm and its requirements.
For each of these areas clarify what are must haves and the nice to haves, i.e. the skills you need to master vs. the ones you can start to learn but afford to not master to get a job offer. To do so you can:
- Review the job descriptions in the market,
- Interview people doing this job,
- Review the curriculum of the courses leading to a qualification necessary for this job.
Building your job interview pitch
While analyzing your gaps, make sure to list your strengths and weaknesses. Use this list to prepare your job interviews and show that:
- You are a good fit (using your strengths),
- You understand the areas where you lack compared to other candidates,
- You took steps to mitigate these.
Showing awareness of your the gaps proves a certain maturity. Indicating that you took steps to bridge these gaps signals pro-activity to achieve success. Both gives you an extra hedge to get this job.
At this point you identified what separates you from your goal. In the next step will we see how to bridge this gap:
