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Getting into a new field when training is outBy Peter Gray
But she ran into resistance from prospective employers. She had trouble landing interviews, and when she did, she got passed over for candidates with current professional event planning credentials. A career shift from cattle ranching to event planning is an extreme example, but even someone with more modest career-change goals can be maddened by the catch-22: You can't get the job without the right experience, but you can't get experience with-out the right job. Meanwhile, we keep hearing there is a labor shortage, especially in the Madison area, where the unemployment rate is among the lowest in the country. Open jobs can go unfilled for months, presumably enough time for a career changer to be trained and become productive. So why won't more employers take a chance on training someone to tackle something new? In my experience as a recruiter, every hiring manager would rather hire someone who can, in the phrase I often hear, "hit the ground running." Hiring managers sometimes start out willing to interview generalist candidates who would have a learning curve, yet show a promising personality fit for the job; but after meeting a few such candidates, they almost always change their minds. They decide they'd rather stick to hiring a seasoned specialist with a demonstrated commitment to the field, who can do the job yesterday. Have companies given up on training employees? No, but they are changing their ap-proach to training in ways that don't help career changers. "Overall investment in training is increasing, but the dollars are shifting," said Tom Gloudeman, a senior consultant at Howick Associates in Madison. "Em-ployers are focusing their training efforts on developing and retaining their high-performing, high-potential employees, rather than providing dollars to train new hires. Given the pressures on the business to perform, when most organizations have an opening, they want to hire with immediate impact." In some fields, the shift away from new-hire training is stark. Take commercial banking. A decade or two ago, most large banks had a formal 18-month credit training program for new lenders. Now few such programs exist; with lenders getting lured away or sent away by merger-driven layoffs, banks found they were not recouping the investment in their costly training programs. Now that banks face a shortage of experienced lenders with formal credit training, they struggle with a conundrum: They are ill-suited to hire career changers because they lack the training platforms to mold them, yet they are reluctant to re-establish training programs because then their trained lenders would become targets for poaching by other banks. So they end up in a war for talent over the dwindling talent pool of trained lenders, while turning a cold shoulder to potential new mid-career entrants to the field. This situation can be nothing short of maddening to aspiring career changers. What to do? There are no easy answers, but here are a few thoughts: Don't quit your job. If you are unhappily employed and looking to change paths, do not leave your job to focus on your job search. Looking for a new opportunity while employed is hard, but it puts time on your side. Look for happiness at your current employer. Most companies are willing to be flexible to keep good employees. If you can get experience in (or closer to) your new area of interest at your current employer, bring it up with your manager or someone in human resources. Gloudeman cautioned that this approach is more likely to work if you are coming form a position of strength as a top performer already. Do the work, don't just look for work. Especially if you are between jobs, seek out ways to get the right new experience on a volunteer or independent-consulting basis. That will build your professional credibility and confidence in securing and conducting interviews. And if you can land a paying client, you may even discover you can make the transition by working for yourself. Prove you'll be a profitable hire. The biggest reason employers balk at hiring career changers is the financial risk - the fear that a new hire's learning curve will be too gradual, or that the person will underperform, lose interest and quit, or otherwise fail to deliver a return on the company's investment. The best way to overcome this (often unspoken) objection is by making a solid business case for how you'll create value for the organization. Even someone looking to make a career change as radical as cattle ranching to event planning can pull it off, if she can show how she will improve an organization's bottom line. peterg@qstaff.com madison.com ©2009 Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved. |
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