Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

As with any change in careers, you need to take the parts of your background and experience that are relevant to your new industry and make them stand out, and play down areas that are not relevant.

Dear Abhijitdesai3,

Four words of advice spring to mind here: slow the hell down.

With a year under your belt and in two different fields, you run the risk of employers looking at your résumé and seeing not you as a brilliant employee, you you as a rubber ball, bouncing here and there.

You want to shift to either FMCG or telecommunications?

All right. So shift.

Apply for jobs, arrange interviews, and meet people. But before you get all excited about any of those things, find people currently in the roles you now want to move into and ask them questions.

Lots and lots of questions.

How suited you might be, what are the hours, what are the clients like, what are the good parts, the pitfalls, the benefits, the potential for advancement, the salary, and so on.

And don't just ask one person. Ask five or six. offer to buy them lunch and tell them your goal. Explain to them that you want to whole story, warts and all.

Then make a move from there and armed with all that information.

If you don't do this, six months from now you'll be heading into something else, then another eight months on, you'll be out of the door again, somewhere else.

And within two years from now you'll have had six jobs, in which you won't have been around long enough to learn anything that can benefit either you or your employer and their clients or customers.

That's not a career track in the classic sense of the word. That's the life of a nomad!

Who knows, with the average age of CEOs falling by the year (or so it seems) your new, 25 year-old boss might want someone that's bounced from here and there, rendering everything you've just read as complete tosh.

But perhaps not.

If you're going to jump ship every time a wave slaps against the prow while your ship's at anchor in the harbour, do so and good luck to you.

But every now and again, and in order to set foot on new land, it's necessary to set out to sea and face being knocked around a little by the storms of life.

No one said it was going to be easy, and regardless of your qualifications, no one owes you a job, or a living (read that again).

The choices you make must be your own and the results of said choices must be lived with by you, no one else.

If you're going to shift, shift. But before you do anything, figure out where you see yourself and where you want to be one year, three years, and five years from now. Otherwise, you'll be bouncing from one job to another for a very long time.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

What makes you think that the grass is greener in these other areas? What's attracting you to them? What attracted you to the other areas (that you chose and not abandoned). Before you jump (as my colleagues have suggested), think about your real goals/needs.