Keys to Success When Changing Careers

Making a career move can be a long and arduous journey.

You’re pushing yourself toward a BIG goal and making a significant life change.

It’s not easy to learn new skills and navigate a competitive job market, especially when you're pursuing an entirely new career.

The sad reality is that most people burn out and revert to settling in their current job, remaining unfulfilled and unhappy.

After working with hundreds of career changers and job seekers, I’ve noticed that three key factors consistently lead to success:

1. Making a total commitment to your future goal
2. Cultivating a growth mindset
3. Creating a support system. This is a group of mentors, coaches, and peers (other people in your situation) who understand where you’re going and who will:
   • Steer you in the right direction and guide you with their experience
   • Answer your questions
   • Hold you accountable for staying on track toward your goal
   • Be your cheering squad and give you the positive energy you need to push through those inevitable hard days

 (we’ll focus on #3 today and #1-2 in future articles)

If you're going through a career change or actively looking for a job, you know it’s tough.

It’s hard to keep applying for jobs over and over again.

It sucks getting rejection letters.

It’s exhausting preparing for interviews.

Somedays you just don’t want to do it anymore. It’s a mental and emotional rollercoaster.

That’s why having people in your corner, supporting you, guiding you, and cheering you on, makes a massive difference in your ability to make your career move successfully.

Here are some things you can do to build your support system once you identify the career/role that you want to target (to determine the right role to target, see last week’s article)

1. Join a community that has an active chatroom or discussion forum. There are communities for just about every profession. For example, if you’re pursuing a Sales Engineering role, PreSales Collective is a great, free option with an active Slack workspace. If you’re looking to go the Sales Development Rep/Account Executive route, RevGenius is an excellent place to start. In these communities, you can ask questions, learn from discussions, and connect with professionals in your target field.
2. Follow people who post about your target career. For example, if you’re interested in Tech Sales, follow the likes of Florin Tatulea or Alex Kremer. Ask questions on their posts. Use the post’s comment thread as a place to learn, discuss, and connect with other people who are in Tech sales. For Customer Success, you can follow Carly Agar; or for Project Management, follow Melissa Chapman. These are just a few examples - there are many more out there.
3. Get an accountability partner. This could be someone who is also pursuing a new role, or it could be a coach/mentor. Your accountability partner is the person you’ll meet with every week to share your progress toward your goals. You’ll discuss:
   • What challenges did you face last week? (e.g. you received a few rejection emails)
   • What wins did you have? (e.g. you landed an interview at a target company!)
   • What are you doing that’s working? Or not working that you need to adjust?
   • Did you hit your goals for applying to jobs, upskilling, and contacting people to network?

Your new group of friends and supporters will help you reach your goals and serve as a foundational network to aid your growth as you launch into your new career.

Get out there and build your support group! And if you need help, go back to the beginning of this article. ☝️ 😉

Keep pushing forward. I’m rooting for you!

Yuji

If you could use help landing your next AE or SE role, we can help! Apply to work with us 1-on-1. We'll personally reach out to chat about how we can help you accelerate your job search.