TORC

As the current economic climate continues to challenge us and with the labour market contracting (for details, see the CSO Earnings and Labour Costs Report – 20/11/09 and the FAS Quarterly Commentary 4/11/09), departing employees need to be open to exploring all their options in an attempt to secure new employment. For many former employees and self employed this can mean looking at a complete career change.

We hear a lot of talk about career change but in our experience in providing outplacement support, the critical requirement for career changers to be successful is to understand the commitment required to make a change, develop a comprehensive plan of action and follow through on the plan – relentlessly.

Reasons why career change plans fail are:
- The investment of time and money required in acquiring the skills and additional training/education can seem daunting

- We haven’t convinced ourselves that we will succeed

- We try to make the change happen in a vacuum – don’t identify our supports

- We don’t understand that we may need to take a step back before we can move forward e.g. reduced salary, seniority etc.

- We haven’t made efforts to fully understand the new industry/sector

- We assume that career change is about rewriting our CV and dropping it everywhere

You can see a Model for Career Change by clicking here.

To review case studies related to career change and outplacement click here.