Pivoting During a Pandemic: What You Can Do to Maintain Momentum
This is a Strategic Momentum Community Post.
By: Linda Jenkins
These are uncertain times we're in. It has been taxing for us to keep count of the days since the coronavirus pandemic began. The economy has been significantly affected, causing a ripple effect: with businesses minimizing its human resources or worse— shutting down, to employees making do with adjusted work hours.
Given the uncertainty, you may want to consider rethinking or reevaluating your plans for a career change in the middle of this pandemic. (If you’re on the fence, listen to Episode 76 with Jenny Blake who walks you through the steps to considering a career pivot.)
But if your intention is solid to change careers, here's what you can do to stay a step ahead:
1. Assess your strong points
Whether these are technical skills, soft skills, or character traits, fully recognizing useful and valuable skills or qualities that can carry over to any job is the first step. One of the most underrated skills that barely gets mentioned in resumés is transferable skills.
Transferable skills are the opposite of technical or specialized skills. These are abilities or skills that you learned or picked up along the way applicable for different roles or professions. Transferable skills are not confined to a specific industry, unlike technical skills. Transferable skills can be in writing, organization, research, numbers, or event planning, whereas specialized/hard skills are marketing, software development, nursing, accounting, and so on; basically, any skills that are acquired through formal school or training.
Recognizing your transferable skills and understanding how this can be useful with your career crossover will help you assess which career is best suited for those skills. This also helps narrow down your job list, so you can focus on the vacancies where you have a higher chance of qualifying.
For example, a marketing career usually involves strong writing or verbal communication skills or online marketing exposure. These are valuable skills that can get you job opportunities in writing or social media management.
2. Create online visibility
Creating online visibility and brand awareness is not exclusive to businesses, but it is a fool-proof marketing strategy for everyone that needs to get noticed. In this case, you are being the brand that needs awareness to the market you are targeting, i.e. potential employers and recruiters.
Social media is an excellent way to network, job search, and be visible. LinkedIn is the Facebook of professionals and jobseekers, so having a profile is useful.
But that alone won't be enough. Adjust your online habits by creating and sharing relevant content on your social media platforms, upload your resume on LinkedIn – and be active on it, and sign-up with top job websites.
3. Get the word out that you're available
About 95% of recruiters use LinkedIn for workforce pooling and keeping tabs on potential candidates. However, creating a profile alone is not enough to get on the recruiter's radar. Turning on LinkedIn's #OpenToWork feature enables multiple recruiters to know that you are actively looking, expanding your job opportunities to a broader range.
This also applies to networking and reaching out to people who work in the industry or career path that you have narrowed down. Letting them know that you are open to opportunities and looking for job vacancies puts you on their radar when something comes up, or they can refer you to other people with better connections to the job market.
4. Try out working from home
The silver lining with the pandemic is that it forces us to pause on our busy lives to reevaluate our priorities and rethink the lifestyle that takes us away from a quality and meaningful life. While you are sourcing out and applying for vacancies, take the time to evaluate what really matters personally and professionally.
Occupations that we didn't consider would function in a remote job or work-from-home set-up is now a thing of the past. Businesses and employers alike adjust to the limitations set in place to ensure their employees' safety and well-being from the pandemic. This paves the way for those who can work from home to spend time with families while keeping down a job. See if this is something you can get on-board with.
5. Don't turn down opportunities
If something comes your way that would not have been your first or second choice, don't turn it down. Try it out and see how it pans out. You will be surprised how unexpected opportunities can lead you to better opportunities or ones you never thought you needed, could do, or wanted.
And most importantly….
6. Always remind yourself to stay optimistic
Unforeseen events are uncomfortable. Unforeseen life-changing events, on the other hand, are just downright terrifying. Changes are never welcome unless it is absolutely necessary.
It is crucial that one can quickly adapt to these changes as that is the only way to survive with minimal strain emotionally and mentally. It is even more crucial to be hopeful and optimistic that things will get better, and this pandemic is not permanent.
Linda Jenkins is a writer and a contributor. She writes about job hunting and career change to help shed a better light on job search and career development.
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