Overcoming Obstacles with a Career Shift

Last week a Knock 'em Dead reader and visitor to the knockemdead.com site shared his problems with a current career shift. Late thirties, and thirteen unhappy years in sales/marketing, led to career re-appraisal and a subsequent return to university to gain a Finance MBA. Job search now bogging down and stalling out at job interviews when asked about, "why the change from Marketing to Finance?"

This is a case where the diagnosed problem, articulated as "no job offers because of inability to answer a specific question," is more likely to stem from a combination of factors. Here is how I answer his question:

Sorry to hear about your situation, and happy to help you get past it. Your perceived problem is that you haven't yet latched onto the most convincing arguments to justify your career shift and demonstrate that it actually adds a plus to your candidacy. While this is certainly part of the problem, getting your new career direction off the blocks and heading along the right track will to take more than one snappy answer to a tough interview question.

Your success at job interviews will dramatically increase with greater understanding of the function that target job is there to fulfill. No job is added to the payroll for the love of mankind, it is there to solve problems and contribute to the bottom line; understand the small role the job plays in contributing to the bottom line, the problems it is there both to avoid and to solve, and you begin to see what employers look for when they interview potential employees.

To begin with, create a clear picture in your mind about the kind of job you can win, and in which you can succeed once on board. You'll get a picture of this target job from job postings, newspaper ads and talking to people who are doing this job successfully today. You want to understand the target job in terms of

• Major responsibilities and critical deliverables
• Education and desirable skill sets
• Who is successful in it and why
• Who fails in it and why
• What problems the job is there to solve
• What problems it is there to prevent

Then for each of these areas, I want you to discover the learned professional behaviors that come into play in the successful execution of the job's responsibilities. As you'll see in Chapter Twenty of Knock 'em Dead 2005 (KED 05) there are a couple of handfuls of learned professional behaviors that are common to all successful people in all professions and at all levels within those professions. Your job is to get a handle on the behaviors most emphasized in Finance and the specific applications where they come into play in your new profession.

Your best bet for learning more about the day-to-day challenges of the target job, is to talk with people working in your target area within Finance, and ideally people with similar educational and work backgrounds; people who have already made the shift successfully. There are a number of ways you can use professional networks to reach the right people and gather the information you need. To help you expand your networks and networking skills, I want you to take the forty-minute Networking Workshop, you'll learn lots of ways to connect with the professionals who can offer the insight you need. In the short term you will want to:

• Get in touch with the Career Services Director at your university and see who you s/he can connect you with who has made a similar transition
• Check out the university alumni association for members with a Finance MBA and a similar undergraduate degree and/or work history
• Check out your professional association membership directory/databases for people with the shared background
• Join online networking sites and search for members who share the common background and who have made the transition

Apart from people who share your transitional experience from marketing to finance, everyone working in your target financial area is worth speaking to; people up and down the promotional ladder in finance can all offer worthwhile advice. When talking with contacts who share your transitional background, use it to build a bridge and explain your need for practical advice in making the career shift. You will seek answers to the questions we've already discussed and to these:

• How has your marketing/sales background paid off in finance?
• How has it helped you, as a finance professional better understand marketing to the benefit of the corporation?
• What special insights have you gained that make you more productive?
• Why do you think this background of marketing and finance is helpful to an employer?

I also want you talk to your network contacts about how the target job contributes to the bottom line of the company. In simplistic terms, most jobs contribute in one of three ways: they make $ for the company, they save $ for the company or they save time for the company…in which case they save $ and make time to make more $, so a double whammy;-) Finance or marketing, it always comes down to productivity, it's just that the expression of that productivity will differ.

The answers to all these questions are all jigsaw puzzle pieces, that put together, will give you a better understanding of what it takes to be successful in the target job. This knowledge will help you build bridges that connect your past experience with your new direction; and because your transition means you don't have a track record in the target job, a clearly visible understanding of its challenges is critical information for an employer deciding in your favor.

Lack of success so far in your job search might also be traced in part to the orientation of your resume. I mention this because resumes not only open doors for you, they give the employer a focus and road map for the interview. Most resumes are just bald recitations of what we have done in life, and they don't work too well. The most effective resumes start with a clear focus on the target job, and then look backwards into your work history pulling out those experiences and accomplishments that best position you for that target job. Read the Well Stocked Briefcase section at the beginning of Knock 'em Dead 2005 for ways to focus your resume on a target job. If it needs a complete overhaul, check out the Table of Contents, Index and sample Chapter of Resumes that Knock 'em Dead (PDF 165KB.)

At the same time, you might also consider whether your current frustrations might be exacerbated by lack of exposure (verbal inebriation for not getting enough interview action). If you are going about your job search in a limited way, perhaps relying just on job postings that appear on Monster and CareerBuilder, you probably aren't generating enough interview experience for your presentation skills to really shine. You might want to re-tool your job search methods with a careful reading of chapters Four through Nine of KED 05, which will help you get a comprehensive job search up to speed. There are plenty of jobs out there when you go about it the right way. With the insight you are going to gain into the target job, and the interviewing skills you develop from the renewed job search activity you will see dramatic improvements in your interview performance.

Given these new understandings, it still comes down to how you perform at the job interview, so I want you to study my Five Secrets of the Hire column. It will take you inside an interviewer's head and show how all this work I've asked you to do will pay off when you sit face-to-face with potential employers. As your career shift, from sales/marketing to finance, speaks clearly about your lack of comfort with sales, it could also indicate that you aren't comfortable in packaging and selling yourself; chapters Thirteen through Twenty of KED 05 will prepare you for the interviewer's questions and help you craft answers that position you as a professional rather than a snake oil salesman.

When you go through these steps, you are really going to know that target job and what it takes to succeed in it, why you are better suited to this career re-direction and the practicalities of how your marketing background can give you a broader frame of reference in the finance job. Winning a job offer will not depend on the answer to that one question about, "why the change from marketing to finance?" It will depend instead on your obvious understanding of the target job's demands and why you can deliver on them.

Follow this advice and today's problems will soon enough be memories. Hope this helps my friend, do your homework and then go out there and knock 'em dead!