Present My Best Self to Make a Career Pivot / Explore My Career Options

In this class, we're gonna talk about how to explore your career options. We're gonna talk about how to bring together things like your skills, your interests, your values, your vision, and use that to explore career options. So with that, let's go ahead and jump in this class. What we're gonna cover is first Teal's approach to thinking about career exploration.

Then now that you've expanded your idea of possibilities for careers. We're gonna talk about how to narrow that down, how to bring some rigor into the selection process, then we're gonna audit your experience. Cause a lot of times, if you're in the midst of a career shift or a career pivot, you might say I don't have the experience.

We're gonna talk about how to go and catalog all the things you've done. So you can then repackage it and present it for the role that you want to do. And then we'll wrap up. All right. So with that, let's go ahead and jump. In this section, we're gonna talk about our approach to a career shift and how to explore your options.

It starts with our process and how we think about career exploration. And we'll run through it here real quick. If you've watched any of the other career shifting classes, we always kick it off with this because we want you to think about it as a process. It can be in a very overwhelming process. And if we put some structure to it and some steps, maybe you can start to feel like you can get a little more control of.

So it starts with your style and values. If you haven't done that yet, we recommend you do it. Then your skills and interests, then you can start to explore those career options. Where do you fit understanding organizations, understanding functions, where could you go within a company? And what works for you?

And then analyzing those options. What's that process by which you make a selection. So that's what we're gonna cover here in this class. And then to build a plan. And that's the next class in this program is how you put it all together and make a plan and then take action on it. And then you jump into your job search.

Having too many career choices can start to block you and prevent you from making that next step. Cuz really there are so many things a person can do and that you can do that. That might start to become overwhelming on which path to take. And it also, it's a very, it feels like a very heavy decision.

It feels like a one way door. You make it and you can't go back, which is also not true. You're. Of a pivot. You can pivot again, if you don't find the right one, remember a lot of the way that we think about these things is approaching it ly and iteratively, but it is still a heavy decision.

And so you really wanna narrow it down. The broader it is the harder it is to present yourself the harder it is to decide what you want to do. So that's what we want to cover is narrowing down those choices in this. And here's our decision making framework for it is you wanna explore that's that divergent thinking?

Think about all the possibilities, think about all the things that excite you and interest you. Then you want to analyze it and narrow it down, go to that convergent thinking, start to focus it, bucket it down, and then go test it. Whether that be through informational interviews or something, a little bigger, like taking that job, go out and apply interviews, see how it goes.

And if that goes well, then embark on the job search. If it doesn. Do it again. And that's what we, that's why it's drawn this way as a cycle, cuz that's why we think about it. It's an iterative loop. It's really important that you've got a good sense of self as you go into this process. If you don't have a good idea of what it is that you want to do, your style, your values, your skills, your interests, and those experiences that you can have that you can leverage to go pursue that new opportunity.

You might find yourself back where you are now which is that sense of frustration with the career path that you're on, that you don't like it. And that's why you're exploring this transition to begin with. So we wanna make sure that you've done that self exploration and you have a good understanding of self as you embark in this refinement process.

So that's what this session is gonna show you, how to do is how to leverage your past, to redirect your future. We're gonna talk about things you've accomplished and then ultimately how to repackage that up and take it to market to pursue those new career paths that you're excited about in this section.

We're gonna talk about how to start to narrow down your options. You've gone through the process of expanding all the possibilities, looking at what's possible. And now how are you gonna start to make some steps and decisions on how to narrow that down to what you wanna do? Career shifts of any kind take time and they're iterative.

And what we mean by that is it's not that you just go out and look at all the possibilities and you think about what you wanna do, and then you just go do it. What we recommend is go try it out. Not necessarily go take that job, but do an informational interview actually apply for the jobs. Go on an interview, talk to people.

And see if this is really a job you wanna pursue. And it's one that really excites you. You want to think of it like a designer. You're gonna go out and you're gonna try it. And you're gonna come back and try it again. And you're gonna iterate and get yourself to a place of higher certainty and higher excitement around a role that you wanna pursue.

And we recommend that you start to structure the information and track it all. Cause if you keep it all in your head, that's when it really starts to feel overwhelming and feel like you're juggling too many balls and there's too many things in the air. So use the tracker that we've created to manage your career shift.

It's in the tools section of the platform it's called the career shift. and you can open it up and you can start to track these changes. We cover it in more depth in the motivations and values classes. So we're not gonna go into it in too much depth in this class. To start to narrow down your options.

You need to know yourself to make these better decisions. And one of the things you wanna ask yourself is how does this match my work style and skills? What are the things that I'm naturally motivated to do? And what are the skills I have already that energize me that I'm interested in doing? How does this occupation fit my values, the things that matter to me, how does this job fit my values?

And how much does it align? Interests. Those are the gonna be the things that ultimately motivate me, get me excited to jump outta bed in the morning. And as we're looking at opportunities and we're looking at jobs, these are the things we wanna continue to ask ourselves in the process. And we really wanna get it down to one to three choices.

If you really keep it vast five, 10 different possibilities, I might wanna do marketing. I might wanna do design. I might wanna do product management. that's really hard to manage all those. Just let's just take it real simple. You got a hundred percent energy now you're giving 33% to each. Every time you expand it, it's more and more.

So we really recommend that you do one to three and then what you do is one out one in, so if you're exploring three possibilities, keep it to three. If you've ruled one out, but you're not really settled yet, then add one back and then test. Take one out, put one back, keep it tight. Cause if you have too many, you just won't be able to make that progress.

So that rigor and that forcing on yourself to be decisive is really valuable. That's not to say that it's the final decision, but just keep the set small as you work through it, to help you prioritize. We have that same tool and here we'll go ahead and pop it open so you guys can see how to use it in a little more.

So here, we've got the career shift research tool and it's in the platform. You can just search for it in the tools. And what you wanna do is go over to the prioritized tab. And what you can do is you can put in the job title, the industry. The job requirements, not the whole job description from a job posting, but some of the key things that are required for this job, compensation range, the experience required.

And then you can start to rank them one to three. And what this will allow you do is prioritize the ones that you're excited about. So put 'em all in here, so you don't lose 'em and you can track them and see the things you're excited about. And again, you get 'em outta your head, but then you can start to prioritize.

Force those decisions, cuz the prioritization is the hard part. You've only got so much time in the day and so much energy to give to this process cuz it's exhausting and daunting and we totally get it. So the more that you can track it and prioritize and remove needing to carry that all in your head, the easiest.

So we highly recommend that you go ahead and use the teal career shift research tool and it's in the tools and that's just how you search for it and find it. And you can start to make your own copy and start to fill it. Let's go ahead and jump back to the presentation. So we want to come back to this idea of experimenting, right?

Right now you're in this exploratory phase of thinking about what's possible and what are all the things that you could do? And there are so many choices, so we want you to plan to experiment. And one of the best ways to do that is through having conversations and getting exposure, cuz it might be to have, it might be one thing to have an idea of what an occupation is, but until you really get to test it, you don't know.

The idea of going and doing an internship as a, mid-career professional, that's pretty daunting and not realistic, but doing informational interviews, maybe taking on a little bit of volunteer work, those are actually very possible, doing a project on your own very possible.

So we want to talk about some of the ways that you might do that. some of the simple things you can do are you can read about them. You can talk to experts again, informational interviewing. You can take classes, you can read articles, you can write articles and start to engage in the industry. And then the craft or things that might take a little more effort, but might give you a better sense of the profession or the occupation or the craft is to take on a new project on your own, maybe within your current job.

Go and talk to that department. If you're thinking about going from marketing to product management or from product management to engineering or from design to marketing, go and see if you can pick up a task or two, see if you can help be willing to put in that extra time, work your 40 hours at your job, but then do a little extra.

And what you're getting in return is an opportunity to learn. Don't think about it as a, as you giving time to the company and them milking time outta you. What you're looking for are opportunities for you to. Really test out that occupation next it's maybe engage in volunteering. And some of the other classes we've talked about, catch a fire will make a reference to it a little bit later or, potentially try to build a portfolio of your own work.

That's a way for you to do more self-initiated things and of make up your own projects. Those are other ways that you could explore and try these occupations on your own before you jump into fully trying to apply. If you do choose to pursue it well, then you'll start to have a portfolio of work.

That'll help you make the case for why you should get hired for it, even though you're transitioning and you're new to it, it's really important that you build the plan. So going back to the career shift tool that I talked about earlier, go to the tab that allows you to. Build your plan. It helps you think about the skills you need to have the abilities, the experience that you have as you track these different possibilities.

Again, the more you can get outta your head. can't say this enough and I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record here, but you wanna get the stuff outta your head. That's part of what makes it really overwhelming is that we get excited about all these possibilities and then we don't know how to pick.

So the more you can get it down on paper and outta here, that'll free you up to think. Possibilities and the exciting things you can do. So I'm not gonna go ahead and open this tool, cuz it's the same one we looked at before. So it's just another tab in there. And you can explore. It's pretty self-explanatory like I said earlier, The best way to know is to actually get to do the work yourself and a low risk way to do it is to volunteer.

It's a great platform called catch a fire where you can volunteer to help nonprofits. So they're not gonna be as choosy and selective if you've actually had that experience or not. So someone needs a website built and you've been meaning to learn how to do it. Here's a great way to do it. Someone needs some data analysis, someone needs some paid marketing.

Someone needs some social media. You can find those opportunities here and you can volunteer. And it's a great way for you to start to build that portfolio of work that will help you with that career transition or that career pivot in the. In this section, we want to talk about your existing experiences.

A lot of times, for folks making a career pivot or a career shift, they say I don't have experience doing that, or I don't have those abilities, but the truth is most skills are transferable unless they're highly specific. So what we wanna talk about is a process for you to go and audit your experiences, to help you make that case for you in a new position that you didn't have before.

So your accomplishments can help you translate your skills and accomplishments are very specific way about thinking about your abilities. It's not just saying I know Salesforce, or I know HubSpot, or I know Photoshop, or I know how to do sales. You're going to need to prove that you know how to do these things.

So we want to talk about a way of thinking about accomplishments and documenting accomplishments so that you can use them as you make that case for yourself. As you look for these new positions. So an achievement is empirical proof that shows you have a skill and empirical is the key word here.

Obviously they're still taking your word because they weren't there, but it is a way for you to make a case empirically with data that shows you've done that thing. And it's a great way to document your experiences. So the way we think about an achievement is it's the. Plus the proof. And again, we're talking about proof in this empirical way, things that you can back up and you can speak to and someone could reference check you on.

So here's an example of an achievement. The skill planning events organized an event. Maybe you're transitioning from product management, from HR into event marketing, but you've organized an event because you did it for a company event and now you want, and you really like it. And you want to go to event marketing.

So you organized an event for potential 500 members that led to 90 new leads. Right now. You've got the skill. Event planning event, organization and proof. What was the outcome for the business? So maybe this is someone who was in. HR jumped in and helped the sales team or potentially a recruiter who's transitioning from recruiting internally being in the cost center, part of the business to transitioning to sales.

Lots of overlap there in terms of motions and daily activities. It's just a different context. So what you need to do. Talk about these achievements that you've done in this empirical way. And then you can recontextualize it, as you tell your story. So what we want you to do is start to think about the things that you've done over the jobs that you've had and write down your achievements this way you wanna look for the skill.

It's probably not gonna be too specific to the role it's gonna Mo like I said, most skills are transferable and proof that you did it, and that you did it effect. So you want to think, did you solve a major problem? Did you save the company money? Did you make something better? Did you train, mentor or manage anybody?

Did you make something new or did you achieve and exceed goals? Think about those times in your career at previous jobs that you might have been involved in any of these activities, then you can start to document those achievements. You have lots of skills and even more knowledge that can be transferred.

Again. A lot of people worry that it's not transferable that they can't do it, but you absolutely can. Everyone's a project manager in some capacity, everyone's a product manager in some capacity. Everyone's a marketer in some capacity. So you can look for these skills that are transferable and then recontextualize them, as you tell your story.

Let's look at some examples here of achievements. Now these look a lot like resume achievements, but don't worry so much about how it would make its way onto your resume. Rest assured that these will eventually make it onto your resume and they will make that work easier. But right now don't worry about that right now.

Focus on documenting things that you've done. So you can audit your past to redirect your future. So if you've planned events, you organized a sold out charity event, right? Maybe you're going from the nonprofit world to the for-profit world, manage cross-functional project, that is gonna be applicable to many jobs, lots of jobs and different functions are gonna have a requirement for cross-functional collaboration, whether you did that in HR or in marketing.

Think about times that you did that you might have done training, whether it was enablement, training, internal training sales training, that's gonna be transferable worked on internal systems. If you're looking for operational positions, if you did that internally on HR and you did budgeting, but you wanna go to finance, you can do that.

So here's some good examples of achievements and should help you think about achievements that you've made in your career so that you can help yourself get those jobs in the future. We've got a little tool. It's a really simple tool right now. It's gonna be getting some upgrades, hopefully by the time you see this video they're live, but it helps you structure your achievements.

I'll just go ahead and pop it open and just give you a quick run through and show you what it does. But we won't go into too much detail with it. So this tool's called the master resume and it's really more of a career history, which is really the idea. So what you'll do is you'll add a work experience, just pick a company, I'll do teal.

And in my case, I'm the CEO location is New York. And we'll just put in any date here. And I wouldn't worry too much about the accuracy of that at the moment. Cause what you wanna get to is adding an achievement. And if you go to the achievement assistant, it'll pop up this little tool to help you.

And you can say, what kind of achievement was it? In my case, it was a metric improvement and I increased let's say revenue.From, or let's say by 200% in two years by building a sales team.

All right. And you can see it, build it out for. Down for you right here. So the point of this tool is to help you prompt the words and the ideas of how to structure these achievements. So then once you save it, you've got your achievements and you can click and edit it. And it may not be semantically exactly what you want, but there's a bunch of words there in each of these achievements.

If you pick that main category, you can see as you go in. Different kinds of things that you could have affected. So hopefully that helps, obviously you can come up with your own, but the whole idea of this tool is to grease the wheels a little bit and help you come up with some ideas. All right.

So with that, let's jump back over to the presentation. All right. So that does it for this section. Again, the idea is to think through your past and all the things you've done, cuz now we're gonna talk about how you repackage those to help you get those future jobs. In this section, we're gonna talk about how to repackage your experience and what we mean by that is taking that pass that we just talked about in that previous section and how to recontextualize and how to present it, to get new roles.

I wanna show a case study that I think is really relevant to what you're trying to do right now with potentially doing a career shift. I don't know if you know this, but in the early days, Airbnb was having a really hard time filling their spaces and the product was great. The technology was great, but they were letting the hosts take pictures of their space on their own.

And what the founders did was they went out and hired professional photographers and stagers to take better pictures of the apartments. And after that, their growth skyrocketed, same apartments, same platform, same user experience, better photography. So the point here and the moral of the story is. How you package it and how you present.

It makes all the differences in the world. And that's what we want you to do with yourself. You're the product that you are taking to market. That product has incredible features, but you gotta make sure that you present them right to the market so that they want it. So let's talk a little bit about how we do that.

Employers won't assume that your skills are transferable. What I mean by that is they're not gonna read your resume of that time that you were an event planner. And now you're looking to go into recruiting. They're not gonna give you the credit. They're not gonna assume all those incredible things that you did and how they transfer.

Over to this new role, hiring is a risky proposition. So when people are hiring, they're not looking for reasons to say yes, they're looking for reasons to say no. So you need to do that repackaging. You need to build those bridges for them to understand how, what you did. Is relevant to what they want you to do.

You wanna show that you've got those abilities, you meet those requirements that they're asking for. It's just a new context and that's why you're eventually gonna talk about those achievements in the form that we talked about, but framed under the needs that they have. So you've got your achievements, the things you've done.

Their requirements. You were in a different context. They're asking for things in one context, your job is to put those two together, right? If they're saying, must have experience running events, because this is an event marketing position and you ran events for again, recruiting. You can make the case.

Sure. Maybe you weren't a marketer, but you can show that you know how to run events. You just have to recontextualize it. What are they gonna want from marketing to generate leads? Maybe it was an event to attract candidates. The same intent was there to bring in the lead. That's what you did.

It was just a different kind of lead than a customer. It was talent, right? And there's gonna be lots and lots of examples where you can, recontextualize what you did to what they need. And that's a really important part of this repackaging we're talking about. You're gonna wanna focus on your skills that are most general, right?

Cause sometimes occupations and roles are gonna have very specific needs, a particular software or a very specific industry domain knowledge. Obviously you, those, you can't fabricate and have them come up overnight, but. I would say that the majority of skills on a job are actually these general skills that you can recontextualize and that you definitely can learn.

The domain stuff tends to be a little smaller and some companies much prefer that you have the tactical knowledge and then they can teach you the domain. You can also build up those skills the way we talked about earlier through volunteering. So there's ways to get to them, but the more you can understand, what are all the things that you have already as general or transferable, and then what are those gaps you need to fill on the specific that's gonna help you make your case better for going into this position?

Not having done it before. So a job posting is the place that's gonna tell you that difference. And before you start to apply, this is part of that exploration. You can do, go and start to look at job descriptions and see what they're asking for. Here's an example of a job description that we've just copied and pasted for a position.

And when you look at it, you can see relationship with our C. Very transferable, knowledge of Peloton products. You could pick that up. If you don't have one, you can buy one, you could return it. You can go use one in the store. You can read about it online. You can find a friend that has.

You can get that stuff. Verbal written communication skills, very transferable using complex customer service issues, potentially escalated members. If you were in customer service before or customer support before or customer experience before, just maybe not in this particular context, you can make a case for that.

All right. So I won't keep going here, but you get the ideas. You can find which ones of these are transferable. Then you can look at your experiences, your achievements, because you start to build up that master resume or that career history. And you can start to put them side by side with the job requirements, and you're gonna be very encouraged to see that little by little, you can do many of these things.

There may be a few of those again, that are super specific and that you can't, but the transferable ones. Let's say they're probably gonna be more than 50% are gonna show you that you can do this. We've got a tool to help you do that. It's called our job track. And it's a, there's a Chrome extension that you install on in your web browser.

And you can go ahead and start to bookmark jobs, right on LinkedIn or indeed, or many of the job boards. I think we support well over 20 or 30 of them now. And then when you bookmark a job and come back to the tracker, it'll start to highlight those keywords for you automatically. So let's jump over and show you what that looks.

All right. We're here in the teal job tracker. I'm not gonna go and show you the whole process, but I wanna show you how the keyword highlighting works. So if I click any of the roles that I've already bookmarked,

It's gonna load that position and you can see that it's gonna highlight all these skills that I need. It's gonna highlight the hard skills and it's gonna highlight the soft skills. That's gonna give me a sense of what these roles require. And then I can see if I've got those abilities and start to cross reference that with my resume.

And you can jump from job to job and you can start to see are there skills that are repeating if I don't have. Should I go get them because that's gonna make me eligible for more of these roles. So we strongly recommend that you use the job tracker and the key word highlighting to help you identify the skills that you need to have.

All right, let's jump back to the presentation to eventually make that case for yourself for a job that you're transitioning into or career pivoting. You're gonna need to do that repackaging. And these are all the places that's gonna have to come through on your resume, your LinkedIn profile, your intro, or your blurb.

You're interviewing. You're gonna have to get really tight when you're giving interview responses that you recontextualize them for the interviewer. And then when you're negotiating companies are probably gonna try to use this against you. You don't have experience you haven't done this. So you're gonna wanna make sure that in every part of the process, you're gonna build those bridges when they say you've never done this before.

Absolutely. I have. This was the outcome. This is how the business benefited. I just haven't done it in this context, but I've proven that I've done it before. You're gonna want to have to. Your case is ready. Your argument for why this should be done. So you really wanted to make its way all the way through all your presentation materials.

And this is another reason we tell you to pick one to three. Really one is better because you don't want to come off as confused on your presentation material. If you're exploring product management, product marketing, let's say UX design, and you talk about all three in each of these places, it's gonna really water down your.

Kind of offering to the market. So what we would recommend is do one, try it for a few weeks. If you're not getting the interest, it's proving to not be as exciting for you, then change it and do the next one. But these are all the places that's gonna have to come through. Now, those achievements, you're gonna recontextualize them into different places.

So you're gonna still wanna document those, but every time you're gonna want to repackage them, cuz you have to make that case for yourself. We recommend that you start to document this all in the master resume template. This is in the platform you just search for master resume template. It's a way for you to document everything, your various versions of your blurb, all the versions of your titles that you have, the titles that you want.

This will be coming a more robust tool within the platform, but for now we recommend you use this Google doc and just put it in there. It can be very loose and you can use the achievement tool to help you structure the achievements. But having 'em all. Documented within this master resume can be a really helpful time saver.

So I can't emphasize this enough. Making a career shift is an iterative process, and you're gonna want to go through these cycles. It doesn't just have to be one decision. That's the one. And that's a really heavy decision. Try one, go have informational interviews, apply to a few jobs, look at a lot of the JDS.

If you don't like it, then go back and try again. Really think about this as an agile development process, it's iterative and you're gonna learn with each cycle. And every time you go around that cycle, you're gonna get closer and closer to that job that really excites you. You're gonna take it. You're gonna get it.

You're gonna land it. And then if you don't like that, Then you can do it again, right? Careers are long they're non-linear they're windy roads. And when you're on a journey to finding that work that really excites you and fulfills you, that end goal is gonna be incredible and we're here to help you with it.

So make sure that you remember it's an iterative process, approach it with that growth mindset and you will step by step. Find that job that's super fulfilling, meaningful, and super exciting. All right. So with that, we'll go ahead and wrap up the class. The main thing we want you to take away from this class is that you need to build the bridges for companies.

You've got a tremendous amount of experience. You've done incredible things. Companies will not give you credit for that out of the box. You need to do that repackaging for them. You're gonna have to recontextualize it for them. You're gonna have to make your case. So go take that time. Document all your achievements, all the incredible things you've done.

If you've gotta go look at job descriptions of previous titles, you've had to help you, fare them out. You can do that and then start to write them down so that you can have them when you're ready to represent yourself and see all the things that you've done. All right. So hopefully that'll help you in your career shift process.

And we'll go ahead and wrap up. Thanks so much.