The 3 phases of a career transitions

We’ve heard about the 5 stages of grief. But have you heard about the 3 stages of career transitions? 

Probably not, because we really just made it up here at Transition Tales. 

But really, after interviewing dozens of people who went through big transitions in their career, we’ve found a pattern of 3 phases that everyone goes through to get to the other side. 

Here they are: 

Phase 1: Something Needs to Change but Where Do I Even Go?

As we all know, this is a phase that can come at any time in your life. 

You might be in school trying to figure out how to survive on your own after graduation. 

Or you might be 7 years into your career and get some kind of wake up call that makes you realize, “oh my goodness if I keep doing what I’m doing I am going to regret it!” 

Or heck, you might be getting ready to retire and realize that you really don’t know what your retirement life is going to look like. 

Regardless of where you are in your career journey, knowing you want a change is hard. There’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of frustration. And there is a lot of fear. 

Phase 1 is the beginning of that journey. You go through self-reflection. You think about the people and things you love or hate about your current job. You look back at the kind of work that best fits your strengths and weaknesses .

Or maybe you don’t think at all. You just know that whatever you’re doing now is not the answer and you dive straight into the next step by quitting your job or your Phd program or pulling the trigger on retirement without a game plan.

And eventually, we move on from this phase when we find the general direction of where we want to go. 

What is interesting to us at Transition Tales is that there is no right answer in terms of how clear or unclear that direction might be. 

For instance, some people we interviewed had done an incredible amount of research. They often developed an incredibly clear sense of their goals. They might have had a specific dream to live in a particular city. They might have had a clear goal to work in a particular job in a particular industry. This clarity ultimately became their north star motivator when times got tough. That’s cool.

Other people didn’t have a specific north star they were chasing. Sometimes they just knew they wanted out. Instead of a specific job, a specific city, these folks nonetheless developed a vague sense of what they are looking for in their next move. For example, they knew they wanted a job that was more creative. Or a team that was more diverse. Or work that was more technical or exact or fast paced. Their north star motivator wasn’t necessarily a destination, it was more the idea of change. That’s cool too. 

Different people have different levels of clarity in what they want. And that’s OK.

What matters is you come to terms with the need for change and a general direction for that change. 

To give some more context to this phase of career transition, here are some of the reasons people knew they needed a career change: 

“Before getting into tech, I worked in retail sales and then for the State of California in the Parks and Recreation department.

I loved that I worked outside in nature all the time when I was at California State Parks.  However, there wasn’t a great growth trajectory for my particular role. I was also looking for a higher-paying job that could sustain me in Santa Cruz, a very high cost of living area. The organization I was at was also probably a decade or two behind in utilizing technology, and I was looking for more of a tech-forward atmosphere.” - Allison Santos

. . .

“So I landed in the digital marketing agency world but I realized I just hated it. It felt like I was giving these recommendations and working with design and engineering and the recommendations never went anywhere. So I wanted to get a little bit closer to actually building things.” - Johnny Nguyen 

Phase 2: I think I know what I want but I have no idea how to get there

“So by around seven months into my job at Yahoo I was sure product management was where I wanted to go and that I needed to make this happen. I have no clue how to do it though.” - Ansu George

“I knew I wanted to transition to tech, but I didn’t know how. First of all, I was completely lost in terms of what I'm supposed to apply for. I didn’t know what half the roles were like Customer Success Manager (it was different from customer support and customer consultant). Did not really know what a product manager was. Quite frankly, I don't even remember the positions that I applied for. I just remembered the roles required a lot of tech experience and of course, I had none.” -Imran Kabir

After you achieve some level of clarity on direction, the next phase is figuring out how to move closer to that direction. 

This phase is daunting because the process to get to where you want to go is often unclear. There is no 1 certification you can take, 1 graduate course, 1 job you can apply to get you from point A to point B. No silver bullet.  

The path involved a slew of different things like…

1. Finding a network of people who can help you in this process

2. Identifying any knowledge and skill gaps and addressing them

3. Improving your ability to communicate the transferable knowledge/skills you developed to a hiring manager

The best way to gather information is to talk to people who have made these transitions in the past.

For example, Verenia Gouhar found pathways to make a large internal promotion from Sales Development to Technical Account Management through networking. Here was her networking process: 

“I would always go on [our internal org chart], find someone on the team that kind of has a similar background as me.

So if they came from sales, that's a really good thing for me to connect with them because they went on the path that I was going on. But if they didn't, that's completely fine too. I would network with two to three people from the team to understand what their day to day workflow was like. I would just ask questions like, “How did you get to where you were?” And if they did come from a technical background, I would just ask, “what is your workflow, how do you like it?”

Here’s another example of how a Transition Tales interviewee, Kalen Beacham, moved from software engineering to product management by leveraging his university alumni network: 

“The most important thing for me to do when I was going about [a career transition] was talking to people who were product managers, especially alumni connections. The School of Management has this great student club geared towards just the technology industry. And so I also used that opportunity to speak with students who've been through the recruiting process. 

I would ask PMs (especially people who’ve just been through the interview process): 

• What does the role entail? 

• What are the hard skills or soft skills needed for the PM role? 

• What rounds did you go through for interviews and what kinds of questions did you have to tackle? 

• What are traits a technology company looks for in a product manager?”