Frances Cook: If you want a job change think skills, not work history

Think skills, not job experience. Photo / 123RF

OPINION:

They say that 2020 didn't bring about new changes, but mostly sped up ones that were already happening under the surface.

The moves to online shopping, working from home, or learning new digital ways of staying in touch; they were all there before, but with a whoosh we suddenly started to use them.

The same happened to our careers. Sure, job tenures have been getting shorter for a while, and workers switching to different industries is now expected at some point.

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But there's nothing like wiping out entire industries, and then boosting others, to give us all pause for thought on what we're doing.

Whether or not your job was impacted, the disruption all around gave plenty of us the motivation to think about how we earn a crust, and if we want to keep doing things that way.

The best advice I've heard on this front is to think about the skills you have, not the areas you've worked in in the past.

You sit down and write down every skill that you can think of, whether it's one you learned through work or hobbies.

So you might be a radio producer, but that entails skills like managing an audio desk, cutting audio, working closely with a host and guests – you get the idea.

Or maybe you love to bake on weekends. Chuck those skills on the list too.

Only once you've got the full list together do you worry about the money side. Go through it and rate each one on how likely it is to make you money, as well as how much you enjoy doing it.

Any that get a big tick on both deserves the strongest investigation.

In good news, the latest figures from job website Seek are encouraging for your chances of success.

The numbers of jobs listed are continuing to bounce back. For Q4 2020, job ads were up 19 per cent on Q3.

Compared to the same time a year before, we're still down a little, but not too much. Year on year there's a dip of seven per cent.

The healthiest sectors are information and communication technology, manufacturing, transport and logistics, and trades and services.

But really, even though that's great news, the important thing is thinking about what you want.

Knowing the healthy sectors is a good idea, but you still might be able to find opportunities in the strangest places, by thinking about your individual strengths.

What skills have you got? How could you continue to build on them?

Rather than starting over and putting in the expense of training in something new, just to start at the bottom, you can transition into something related but different. That means you also hopefully retain some of your previous pay rate.

For instance, data journalism is a new area in my industry. I know people who worked in coding previously, who have moved into newsrooms and learned the journalism part on the job.

Others are journalists who taught themselves to code in their own time, before making the leap into a new role.

The end result is an entirely different job, but one that doesn't scrap years of experience.

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