If you’re bored with your current career or it wasn’t what you had hoped it would be, you don’t have to stay with it. No matter how much work you’ve put into it at this point, if it’s not helping you be happy, if it’s affecting your mental and physical health, if it’s making your home life difficult, or even if it’s just boring, then you can do something about it. You can make a change that will enhance your life and your career.
We’re so lucky that we live in a time that offers so much opportunity, and no matter what you want to do, as long as you put in the work, you can achieve it. So, of course, if you want to change your career, the tools are there for you to do it. Yet even knowing this, it can be hard to get started. With that in mind, here are some of the ways you can begin to make a career change.
Know What You Want
Simply knowing that you want to change your career is a good start, but it’s not enough. Unless you know what you do want rather than just what you don’t want, you won’t be able to change anything because you won’t know what steps you need to take.
Even though you might be keen to change careers, it’s crucial you take the time to work out exactly what you want to do. Think about your particular skills as well as where your passions lie and use that as a basis to determine your next career. Perhaps you work in medicine, but you want more freedom; you could become a pharmacist locum in that case. Perhaps you are highly creative, and your current job doesn’t offer much of a chance to use that creativity; what career would? Take steps in that direction.
Tap Into Your Network
No matter what you’re currently doing or what you want to do in the future, you’ll find you have a network around you. You might have personally put this together and ensured it would be full of people who are on the same path as you, or perhaps it is more accidental and simply a group of people you have met in your career and life. In either case, this network could be hugely instrumental in helping you make a career change.
To begin with, there will be people within that network who have changed careers themselves. Speak to them to find out how they went about it and to help bypass any issues that might come up. On top of this, there will be people in your network who are currently working in an area you would like to work in. Ask them for advice about how to get started; they might even be able to introduce you to people who have opportunities for you to take up.
Do More Learning
It might be that the career you want to get into requires some specific qualifications that you don’t yet have. In that case, the first thing you’ll need to do is study for those qualifications. Thanks to technology, this can be done remotely and part-time, meaning you don’t have to sacrifice your current job or income to reach the next step.
Even if you don’t need specific qualifications, there will be skills you do need for the next job you want. You’ll also need to know about the sector and the tasks you’ll be doing. Make sure you do plenty of research, as not only will this help you get a job, but it will help you be sure this is the right step for you.