#3: Re-align your skills
In the previous steps you identified the skill gap separating you from your new career. It is time to lay down a plan to bridge this gap.
Methods to re-skill yourself
Method 1 — Learning by yourself
For most skills, there is a course or online resources that will allow you to acquire them. Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, Edx, MIT Open Courseware are among the most famous platforms. They provide cheap online courses that you can assimilate at your own pace. Most courses also offer practical cases to apply what you learned. Most also deliver a certificate upon success. Beware though: it can be tedious to find the best course or the one which credentials are recognized by employers. Make sure to investigate this before enlisting anywhere!
While online courses are great, do not forget traditional books.
For industry knowledge, I recommend to read diverse business newspapers such as the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. Additionally, you can leverage McKinsey’s or The Boston Consulting Group’s online resources.
Method 2— Going back to University
Universities can offer great training. Yet this method will require a larger financial and time investment. Following courses there might not be compatible with a day job either. Going back to university often demand a sacrifice: either taking a year off or pay an expensive executive degree that is accommodating a job in parallel.
Rely on this option only for skills you cannot learn by any other method. Make sure this is worth it. Analyze which competitive advantage it will give you on the job market.
Method 3 — Learning on the job at your current company
As mentioned in the earlier steps, an option to realize a career change is to do it within your current company. In this case, see if your employer has a development plan in place to ease this transition. If not, be proactive and co-build one with your potential new manager.
The ramp-up in skills will take usually one of the 2 forms. It can be part of your regular development plan or you learn on the job. In the former case you learn the skills before changing job. In the latter you might start at a more junior level and be supervised by an experienced manager. He/She will be in charge or teaching you what you need to learn.
Method 4 — Learning on the job at a new company
Like the previous case, you can take a junior position in a new company and develop your skills set on the job. While simple on paper, this method rely on a tough pre-requisite. You want a company to trust you with a job which you never did before and for which you show little credentials. I would only go this path if you built a minimal of experience to show for, or if you know people in your network that can vouch for you. This will increase your change of getting interviews and to not start too low in the career ladder.
Making a plan
Learning new skills can be tedious for some, enthralling for others. In any cases, it is time consuming. Thus, do not learn skills that you can afford to learn only once started your new job. But make sure to learn the must haves.
To help you meet your goals, I recommend to make a plan with clear timeline (see step 5: “Establish a support system”). For each skill you need to learn, rate its importance (Must have, nice to have, could have). Then, estimate the amount of hours you need to learn these skills. Finally, work backward from your estimated deadline and figure out how many hours per week you need to learn the must haves.
Can you afford this? If your plan is too ambitious you have to relax your timeline or find a way to make time for it. Is it too manageable? You might want to speed up things and be more ambitious.
In any case, once you are settled on this, clean up your plan and make a clear timeline of everything you need to learn for each week. To increase your rate of success:
- Incorporate breaks (during each week, within each month). You are not a machine.
- Allow for failure. It might take longer than expected. You might fail an exam, you might not stick to the timeline due to spending more time with your family or friends. It is OK! Make sure to leave enough buffer in your plan for failure.
- Measure your progress: A simple progress bar goes a long way to motivate you.
- Get help. Do not do this alone. Share your plans with friends and/or family. Ask them to support you: share with them successes and difficulties. If you struggle on a skill, try to find someone in your network that could help.
Some personal examples
Transition from Theoretical Physics to Strategy Consulting
The hardest change I did in my career so far. I was a post-doc in Theoretical Physics and I wanted to join a Strategy Consulting firm.
Finding what to learn
I had to learn everything. Literally. I did not know which activities were part marketing for example. But I could not learn everything from a business in depth. First, I realized I needed to learn the main gears of any business. Second, the most important was to get the job and to do so I had to pass the famous Case Interviews.
Learning what I did not know
I got generic knowledge about businesses using a book called The 10 Days MBA. It offers a great introduction to many subjects. I coupled my readings with explorations of some topics online. I then used forums to understand which books could help me ace the case interviews. I also asked my brother, who studied business and engineering, to help me do mock interviews and get me going. After that, I practiced alone for many months until I felt I was mastering case interviews.
It took me roughly a year to get this done! I was insecure and could be have been more efficient leveraging more people in my network. But I want to show you that it can take time. Once I started working at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), I still had to learn a lot on the job. But that is another story.
Transition to a new job in a new company — Jumia Lead Customer Intelligence
After BCG I took a job at Jumia as a lead Customer Intelligence Analyst. That job required me to do SQL and advanced analytics down the line. I did not really know such things but I knew a bit of R so I was confident I could learn on the job. I trained myself in SQL using online resources the weeks before starting. I then relied on my ability to learn data skills fast to ramp-up as the job required me to do so. It worked because I knew I had time to ramp-up.
Transition within a company — HelloFresh from CRM To Product
While working as the Head of CRM at HelloFresh, I got lucky to have software engineers working in my team. This allowed me to work on some parts of the Product Management role, while not actively doing this role myself. Moreover, my job required me to interact with Product Owners/Managers on a daily basis. Thus, when I was asked to move to the Product Organization to lead the Virality topic, I was not completely lost. That being said, I had a lot to learn about Product. But I got the right setup to do so:
- Enough general knowledge to get by,
- Expertise in the business topic I was leading,
- A Technical Program Manager to support me,
- Peers and a manager willing to help me ramp-up.
Do not assume you can make a career change on your own. It is virtually impossible. Thankfully you have around you people that can help you at the different stage of your process. We will explore this in the next step:
