Oh Dear! A Career Change!

The worst crime you can commit as an employee

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

Job hopping is one thing, but changing to a completely different kind of job?!

Most recruiting managers see such a thing as dangerous. You are not trustworthy, not reliable, and who knows when you will do it again?

Even worse, of course, if you did one thing for a while, then changed to something else – and now want to go back to doing what you used to do.

Most people will see any such change as an expression of failure. You couldn’t make your previous kind of work function, so you had to try something else. If you want to jump back again, it must be because the new path was a failure too.

In fact, most people believe that being stable and doing one particular thing all life, is all that anybody wants – so if your CV doesn’t show that, you didn’t get the life you wanted. And it means that you were not able to do so, hence, you’re not a winner.

We want to surround ourselves by winners, because our lives become so much easier then. Effectively, if everybody around us makes everything work, our own situation becomes easier. As a manager, that could put us in a situation where we can just lean back and relax, while all the workers do all the work.

A somewhat special aspect of this thinking, though, is that companies rarely allow for anyone to stay very long in the same job. Either they will be promoted, changing to a manager job, or they will be pushed around with each organizational change, until they in the end will be fired. Getting the exact same job in another company may not be possible, so they will have to change to something else.

Companies are not giving us what they want to see on our CVs, so they are actively working against their own wishes.

I have at times met people who proudly told me that they had worked 10 or 12 or even more years now in the same job. When talking a bit more, it usually turns out that they actually changed jobs many times during those years, just to something that was still in the same company – and in such a way that they could still claim on their CV that is was one job.

I have rarely, if ever, met people who were impressed to see me or anyone else be promoted several times within a few years, and then move on to something new in another company. That somehow scares people, or makes them think about that failure, I mentioned above. In any case, they see it as an irregularity.

Most people find that being a plumber, a plumbing manager, and a plumber advisory consultant, are all in the same sphere – all more or less the same job. So if your career has looked like that, with a positive, upward progression, then they can often accept it as successful. But some people even consider changing from worker to manager is a shift in career, and that will make them worried about hiring you.

If you have been in the IT consulting business, or many other kinds of companies related to IT, during the last 30-40 years, you will no doubt have experienced a constant stream of mergers, splits, closings, and other changes in the companies themselves, and you, as an employee, will like have had no chance at all to stay in the same job all the way through.

People in a bank or an insurrance company might have seen less turbulence in this way, but they have on the other hand experienced how everything has changed into more and more automation, more and more Internet, and fewer and fewer people. In other words, most of them have been fired along the way, because their workplace cut dramatically down on the headcount.

In fact, it is difficult to find any business that has been just a bit stable during those years, because, first of all – the nature of businesses is that they change over time and do not live forever. Only a few companies have been there for very many years, and they have been undergoing many changes during the years. And then, secondly, the IT and Internet revolutions have changed basically everything in all companies, no matter their trade, often leading to a wish to hire some different employees instead of those the companies already had, or to have fewer than before.

Only the younger people in the most stable companies may have experienced 10-12 years in the same job. And exactly those people have typically not followed the development of the rest of the world, so they don’t understand that most other people couldn’t, no matter if they wanted or not, get a similar development.

If you are a job hunter, you will have to explain every career change, in case you will not have been filtered away before getting the chance to explain. And you will not meet much understanding. If people have to ask, it is because they are not experienced enough to understand it.

Another aspect seems to be that you cannot change back. You really need good arguments to explain why you were a programmer, then a manager, and then again a programmer. This kind of career path both speaks against the “ever upward” idea, that people see as the only way of being successful, and also, it speaks for being a failure: if you had liked being a manager, and if you had been good at it, you would have continued that way.

If you worked in banking, changed to pharma, then you must stay in pharma, and you must explain carefully, forever, during the rest of your life, why you changed.

Well, some people do understand. But they are not many.

Especially people who follow a management career path want to see that same kind of drive in others that they themselves have. So you should also be following a path with still better jobs in that exact same path as you started in.

Some of what matters, is that the one who hires you will be asked why exactly you. And they want to have an easy explanation to give – you came from the exact same kind of job in another company, or you are on a career progression where this is the natural next step for you, or similar.

You may have seen job announcements saying something like “you are on your way up” – which indicates exactly that: they want to be able to tell that story.

It also indicates that they see a time in the future when you’ll no longer be on your way up. Like I described in the Different Lives – Social Acceptance Level article, we are all going down sooner or later. The higher social acceptability level we have, the better reputation, you could say, the longer we may last in our top position, but we will all be pushed down again at some point in time.

There is no such thing as an endlessly upgoing career, except for the very few, and they are typically out of a background that started well, with lots of support from their surroundings, easy access to money, etc., while workers rarely get into such a forever-stream of promotions.

Summing up: very few people have that stable career, forever going upward, that seems to be the typical expectation of hiring managers. Almost everybody will see changes, and most of us also from one kind of job to another, from higher to lower jobs, etc.

It can affect your ability to get a new job. The companies prefer to hire those they see as winners, and as they see career changes as the opposite, you should try to describe things in your CV and in the job interviews so that they sound like the same kind of job in an up-going stream of changes from the very start of your career until now, where this current job opportunity will be the best next step upward for you.

If you have had periods of unemployment, travelling, doing something completely different, caring for a relative, or whatever, you shouldn’t necessarily try to hide it, but you will meet many hiring managers who will refuse to understand what was good about it.

In such situations I suggest simply being proud of what you did: if you helped a relative during their last time on Earth, which is something I have tried myself, then you will meet people who consider that a bad move (one person I talked to told me “let them die”, when I said that my mother wass very ill and needed my assistance), but you’ll know that you did something good and necessary, and that you can be proud of that. You do not live your life for the benefit of those people who don’t understand that.

A hiring manager who speaks badly about it or makes an expression like you are a loser in their eyes, doesn’t deserve to hire you, but you can ask them if they have ever been in a similar situation, and what they decided to do instead ot caring for that relative? There is a chance that they will respect you more when they understand that you did what you did because you wanted to.

Unemployment is, technically speaking, not your fault. If somebody had offered you a job, you may have been an employee instead, but that just didn’t happen. I suggest telling what you did – because, you didn’t just sit in a chair, being unemployed. You studied something, travelled through the parks with your dog and saw many amazing things, and you became a much more relaxed and positive person, on top of already being such one before, but now simply more than ever. It strenghtened you.

If a hiring manager doesn’t understand, they do not deserve you. Again you can ask if they ever experienced something similar? If they ever had that change to spend time on self-improvement and building up a new view on the world.

And this about asking the hiring manager: please try to forget about the word “interview”, because you should make use of the situation to also ask questions, to make sure that the manager is a good fit for you, not just the other way around. Sometimes it isn’t possible, like when the interview is set to last 20 minutes and they set the agenda and want to tick off all items on a checklist. But when possible, try to make it a dialog, human to human. for you own sake, but also to show that it matters to you.

And that leads to a conclusion you can have with you, when explaining why you changed career along the way: that you appreciate the opportunities you have had to meet more people, learn from them, and see the subject matter in a bigger perspective, which now makes you even more ready for the exciting challenges of this job.