A Beginner’s Guide to Late Career to Catch Up
Whether you’re looking for a career change or starting out late with a clean slate, catching up with the rest of your new field can be daunting. Here’s what you can do to keep up with or even outperform your peers at the end of your career.
Find freelance opportunities
Regardless of your industry, the full-time job market can be competitive. Instead of looking for a full-time job, keep a close eye on freelance job opportunities. This will help you grab the attention of companies that may be interested in hiring you full-time if they have room in their budgets and if they find your job particularly valuable.
Freelancing will also force you to practice your hard skills. For example, a friend of mine started an advertising company and heard that I knew how to use Photoshop. He asked me to design some posters for him. I’ve never done posters before, but using others as a reference, I created something original in Photoshop. He liked it, he paid me and asked for more. As I created more, the posters became much simpler and I became more familiar with Photoshop. I also became much more confident in my now proven skills.
Freelancing also exposes you to many different situations, which can be interesting material to share on your resume or give your opinion in a job interview. Better yet, you don’t have to quit your day job or college to start freelancing .
Finally, freelancing forces you to learn about negotiation and pricing . These techniques (such as the portfolio technique ) and this skill set will give you an edge over the rest of your peers.
Volunteer outside of school
You may be in school for the first time, or this may be your second time. While school clubs are a common way to supplement your resume with extracurricular activities, it also makes sense to devote your time to organizing outside of school (try searching LinkedIn ). You will be able to communicate with a wider range of people.
Some organizations or movements, such as Pencils for Promise , are technically school clubs but have a strong off-campus presence. You will be working on a larger scale and solving different types of problems that you might not notice in a small, standard school club.
Alternatively, you can also volunteer for an informal internship. You can reach out to local businesses and ask them if you can stay one day a week and do administrative work for them (or any other job they have to take care of). However, feasibility depends on specific industries. For example, while it may be easy to volunteer and answer phone calls in a doctor’s office, it can be more difficult for lawyers.
However, it helps to build experience and expand your social circle throughout the year without taking up too much time in your daily schedule (if you are in school, this will depend on your class schedule).
Also, while being valuable for a short time is good, if you learn too well to be a helper , people won’t be able to see you as something else. Use this as a way to walk through the door and slowly begin to expand and discover where else you can contribute.
Create (or collaborate) side projects
While side projects may seem like a hobby, they can be a significant asset when making connections with new contacts or recruiters. Most people don’t try side projects because they seem secondary and actually require some creativity and problem solving to get them done right.
The premise of a side project is pretty simple: identify the problem, create something to solve it, and show your solution to people who can use it. Many realistic side project ideas arise from a lack of information between newbies and experts (for example, creating e-books, blogs, or organizing a small trade event for local experts in your industry). You can interview experts to get the information you need to keep newbies informed (you ask great, topical questions because you are a beginner yourself). Even if you’re busy with your day job or school, you can still create a side project outside of office hours .
Similar to freelancing, side projects can force you to develop challenging new skills. For example, a few years ago I created an e-book for learning about internet marketing. I noticed that students had a hard time finding jobs because there was no trust in them (chicken and egg problem), so my eBook was about how they can use guest posts to gain trust. Before writing this, I already wrote frequently for national independent media and was a guest on several blogs.
The e-book connected me with a lot of students and, surprisingly, entrepreneurs. I designed the book myself in InDesign (actually based on the skills I gained while freelancing). A friend of mine helped me develop a website and HTML code it. I learned how to use MailChimp to generate leads. In those three weeks, I acquired more complex skills than I did in a full year at school.
Meet one person in your industry per week
You probably don’t know anyone who can give you the job you would like (since you are reading this post), so you have to find out who these people are. Then you will meet them and make a great impression . This is much easier said than done, so let’s unpack this a little further.
First, don’t go to information sessions or networking events. For the most part, they are ineffective. They may seem convincing, because they are going to all your friends and peers, but this is the problem. Typically, these events bring together a lot of students or start-ups trying to get to know a small number of important people.
Instead of mindlessly going to networking events, try emailing and meeting one new person in your industry every week . If you are a student, most people will be happy to meet you (or at least curious) as you are still in the academic world and therefore not a threat. When you first interact with them, don’t be guided by your needs – instead, learn from their knowledge or experience, or figure out how you can contribute to what they do.
If you are not satisfied with cold e-mail correspondence, just call the office or show up in person. I realize this sounds unconventional, but I actually did it myself when I was looking for a job in advertising. After I asked the secretary to speak with someone in charge of recruiting, I was able to reach him via Skype and LinkedIn.
I had another opportunity that summer, but it was a pretty informative call, and I had the opportunity to subtly state my case for the internship. However, be careful: this plan can backfire if you are particularly aggressive or assertive. Be grateful for at least a minute someone else’s time, because on that day he could be doing something else. You may also need to do this more than a couple of times to get really good at it.
Read as if your income depends on it (because it is)
Although the information is intangible, it is extremely valuable. And he’s too often overlooked. The best of your colleagues have probably received a ton of information, and you have not. This is fine because books and other people’s experiences can help you catch up. You will learn from the mistakes of others and from your trading history.
Focus on regularly reading interesting biographies and articles from people in the field you want to explore. Even if you are currently working part-time in retail and plan to stay in it, learn how the best retailers or brands got started – who the entrepreneurs were, what their paths looked like, and what lessons apply to you. … If you are in the fast food business and do not plan to stay in it, figure out where you are aiming to move and read the industry.
Depending on your industry, news can also be important, so stay tuned to the news without spending too much time on it . Books and longer articles often contain more timeless knowledge that can be more valuable than just keeping up with the news rat race.
Catching up means working harder and smarter.
Starting a new career or switching places is not a walk in the park, but you can definitely quickly become on par with your new peers. Look for freelance work and volunteer opportunities outside of school. Work on side projects and meet new people. Read both news and books, because information is critical.