Building a Holistic Career Using More Than Just Your “Job” Skills
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In this episode:
Building a Holistic Career Using More Than Just Your “Job” Skills: I decided to tackle this topic after receiving a great suggestion from my friend Kirsten. To help frame today’s discussion, I’m going read what Kirsten shared she feels is missing in the conversation and advice regarding careers:
I've been loving this idea of figuring out the skills and expertise you have, not just in your career but in your life, and how you can combine those and transfer into other jobs or careers you might not have known were a good fit for you. I think we grew up focusing on going after a specific career or job, but with as quickly as some types of jobs go away and new ones pop up these days, it makes more sense to me to focus on acquiring skills and expertise in a range vs. going after a specific job. Figuring out how to transfer those is sometimes tricky, especially if you didn't know an industry or career that needs those skills even existed! - Kirsten
I love this conversation because it touches on many elements of what building a creative career is all about! So let’s get into it.
In this episode I share:
How to figure out the skills and expertise you have outside of your work experience
Ways to apply “homegrown” skills to your career
How to show you possess skills earned outside of your career when applying to jobs
I’ll be sharing examples and some case studies from myself, friends and clients alike to help spark ideas for how you can do this, too!
Building a Holistic Career Using More Than Just Your “Job” Skills
How to figure out the skills and expertise you have outside of your work experience
The first step to identifying the skills or expertise you possess starts with knowing where to look. The best recommendation I can give it to start by looking at the things you enjoy doing. While you may enjoy certain activities because of the people you’re with, the relaxation you experience, or some other benefit, it’s likely that there’s another factor at play.
That other factor is your strengths. When I say strengths, I’m talking about the characteristics and capacities you possess that make you stand out from others. Things like:
An ability to organize items or information
An ease of connecting with strangers
An ability to stay motivated and motivate others
An ability to quickly generate ideas or problem solve
When you are doing something, whether for work or otherwise, that uses your strengths you tend to find more enjoyment, satisfaction and fulfillment from it. That’s why even if you’ve never thought about your strengths before, I bet there is some evidence of them in the activities you enjoy doing.
P.S. If you want to learn more about strengths, and what yours may be, I recommend the Clifton StrengthsFinder book and test. This is something I usually have my career coaching clients do. Just a tip--when you buy the book you get an access code to take a strengths test. You don’t need to pay for the online test, unless that’s how you’d prefer to take it.
What do you do outside of work, or what did you do in the past that was fun and life-giving for you? When you think about what aspects of the activity you enjoyed most, is there any evidence of a strength, skill or expertise on display?
Let me give you some examples:
Enjoyment Activity: Watching Movies
I’m going to start with something that likely most of you do--watching movies. Even if you don’t have defined hobbies, or participate in activities outside of work, I’m betting you still make time to watch movies. So this can serve as an example for how to pull insights from something as simple as sitting on the couch.
Try to answer the following questions as I go through them:
What type of movies do you most love watching? Comedy? Action? Documentaries?
What do you enjoy most about the movies, or find you pay the most attention to? For example, do you enjoy the cinematography? The character development? The wardrobe design?
How can this clue you into a special kind of knowledge or skill you have?
For example, I love assessing different movie characters' motivations and decision-making. I lose interest in movies whose character motives are too simplistic or just aren’t believable. But I love a movie that leaves me thinking about the complexity of a character and their decisions days later.
This fascination ties into my strengths of connecting with others, being empathetic and advising. I’ve found that all of these come into play with my work as a career coach because I help people navigate their priorities and goals to find a career that will actually bring them the happiness and opportunity they desire.
As a career coach, I’m not very excited by surface-level goals, but I’m passionate about really helping my clients create a career they love and that aligns with their life values.
Past Experience I Loved: Cooking
Next, I’ll share an example of a past experience I loved and how I was able to glean information about my skills and knowledge from it.
Back in college, I had a summer job as the cook for a local summer program. That summer, there were four 10-day trips of high school students that I had to shop and cook all of the food for. Each meal, there were about 30 people to feed, and usually 2-3 people with allergies to accommodate.
Now, I don’t mean to brag, but I was not just preparing and serving regular old “camp food.” I knew that if I was going to have fun in this role, the cooking needed to be creative, and I wanted to feel proud of everything that was put on people’s plates.
I had two goals:
Every meal would be healthy and nutritionally balanced
To introduce the students to new ingredients, flavors and types of cuisine
At the time, I enjoyed the work. My favorite elements were getting to be creative and the mentorship component it provided me with the few students that helped me prepare dinner each day.
However, looking back, I can see there were a lot more skills at play than what I realized then. Here are some things that I now realized helped me to thrive in that role:
Planning & strategizing: The budget, the shopping, storing food and managing time
Project-based: Each day, I had three big projects of preparing the food on time--I couldn’t procrastinate or decide that I didn’t want to do that type of work that day
Saw the impact of my work: I was motivated by hearing people say “This tastes SO good!” or seeing the satisfaction of a student that learned how to cook a new dish
As it pertains to my career, all three of these elements have continued to be essential for me to thrive in work. Whether it was when I was working for a company, or now for my own business, I have strength and skill in project management, strategy and developing/sticking to a timeline.
Creating an impact continues to be the biggest motivator to me in my career as well. I need to see a direct correlation between what I’m doing and how it helps people.
This knowledge of myself has been incredibly helpful in navigating which jobs I’ve applied for, and what career paths I’ve considered. For example, a couple of years ago, I was really contemplating the direction I wanted to take my career. I was doing this work of researching, writing and podcasting about careers as a side hustle alongside my corporate job.
I knew I loved coming up with ideas, solving problems and spreading knowledge about how to build a more life-giving career. And that led me to considering two career pathways. One was the path I’m currently on: building my own business and serving people as a coach and through resources like courses and my podcast. The second option I was considering was going the academia route to contribute to creating new knowledge through research, writing and teaching.
So much about academia was alluring to me. Having a salary, discovering insights that hadn’t been uncovered before, not needing to “build a brand” so I could focus on deep thinking and writing.
But, I ended up realizing that my needs for seeing the impact of my work, and being able to strategize and manage my own projects were too great for me to be happy in the field of academia. I would personally go crazy if I had to wait years for a paper to be published, or if a discovery that I knew could help people was only known by other academics and I didn’t have the bandwidth to create a program to implement the learnings into action.
Ways to apply “homegrown” skills to your career
Like Kirsten mentioned, it is sometimes tricky to know how a certain skill or ability could be leveraged in a career. If you’ve worked in just one career, or type of organization for your whole career, it may be hard to know what else is out there.
I’m going to share a couple of examples of how others have navigated this situation. Hopefully, it will provide inspiration for how to broaden your view of what careers could be a good fit for you.
Zeroing in on an industry your passionate about
I’m working with a client named Mary. Mary had a career as a nurse that she mostly enjoyed, but she felt like she wanted more. She found she really lit up when talking with her friends and people in her community about their health goals. Mary was great at helping them create plans and motivating her friends to achieve these goals.
While she knew that caring for her patients was important work, she had a special ability to empower people to get over the hurdles they’d been struggling with for a long time and wanted to press into that.
Mary had an idea of what she wanted to do, but didn’t know what jobs would allow her to do that kind of work. She identified that even though her professional background was all health related, what she was really passionate about was professional development.
So she began looking for jobs at companies that offered online learning and professional development services. By doing this research, she found that many of these companies were looking to fill roles for coaches, or client success managers to support their students. When Mary saw these job postings, a lightbulb went off in her head and she knew she was on the right track.
She found her next career by focusing on the skills she wanted to use, then searching in the industry she was passionate about to see what roles existed.
What you want your day-to-day to look like
Another client I worked with recently is Daniel. One thing Daniel is known for is that he loves to fix things and work with hands. He’s always got a project going and his friends know he will be happy to help them with their projects around the house when he’s available.
Daniel was working as a software developer for a couple of years. He got into this career because he saw it as an opportunity to leverage his love of building and creating things. However, after some time he came to terms with the reality he didn’t feel the satisfaction he wanted in his work.
He discovered that he needed a physical hands-on component to his work. Even though he was building things as a developer, he felt like he was going crazy just sitting at a desk all day.
He was able to successfully make a career change to become an IT systems administrator. It allowed him to stay in the tech industry he enjoyed, but it provided significantly more hands-on work with computer hardware and being able to solve interesting problems around the office all day long.
What you do naturally
This next example isn’t one of a career change, but an example of someone who from the start chose a career that was a perfect fit for them.
My friend Bryan is a pilot. One of his unique strengths and natural abilities is his ability to remember geography and destinations. He has an incredible wealth of knowledge when it comes to hiking trails, road trip ideas or camping spots. Anytime we’re looking for an adventure, my husband and I know we can turn to Bryan for some recommendations. He is able to give detailed instructions of exactly how to find hidden gems in the southwest off the top of his head!
Now, his ability to remember places and give instructions in detail expands far beyond the outdoor activities we usually are planning. He’s flown all over the country and has mental maps of countless regions and cities. In his job as a pilot for small charter planes, you can see how this would come in handy.
He’s readily able to identify landmarks from the sky, and he always has destinations in common with his clients or fellow co-pilots that he can use to create interesting conversations and build rapport. While his love of flying is what drew Bryan to become a pilot, his natural strengths and aptitudes make him an incredibly successful one.
How to show you possess skills earned outside of your career when applying to jobs
One of the biggest barriers people have from applying their “homegrown” skills to their careers is imposter syndrome. Many people look at job descriptions that sound exciting and seem to be a good fit, but rule themselves out when they read the qualifications section.
Now, there are some positions and some industries where specific qualifications and experiences are essential. But, a lot of time, the qualifications serve as a way to screen how well candidates actually understand the nature of the position.
For example, when I made my career change from marketing roles into a technical training role, there were qualifications I didn’t meet regarding past experience in training roles. However, what I was able to show in my application and during my interviews is that I understood how to capture the essence of a very technical product and simplify it for marketing purposes (I had been working for an off-grid solar manufacturing company).
Additionally, I was able to pull from my experience as a youth leader. I highlighted how I had planned and coordinated talks and retreats around helping students grow in specific areas of their faith. While I was doing that work back in college, I never saw it through the lens of training. But I was able to prove my related experience for the role by reframing my experience in my resume, cover letter and while interviewing for the job.
There was another aspect of this training position that I wasn’t qualified for. And that was the documentation element. I didn’t have experience with technical writing or managing a knowledge base, but what I did have at the time was my personal blog.
My blog used to be called Jenuine Life, and back then I was primarily sharing interviews with women I admired, writing reflective personal essays and sharing recipes I’d created for my #newfoodieproject series. Honestly, it was something that I was really nervous to show a potential employer because it was very personal.
But, I was able to demonstrate how I had transferable skills to help me manage the tasks this new job required. While I didn’t have technical writing experience, I explained my process for taking the interviews I’d conducted and logically writing them into blog post stories that would help others. And I proved that I’d be able to keep up with the workload by demonstrating I could consistently publish quality writing over time.
The point I hope is clear here is that if you have the skills, you have the skills. However, it is up to you to do the work of showing that you have them. Unless you make it clear with the words and examples you use to talk about your knowledge and abilities, it’s likely that the connections may be missed by others.
Have you pivoted careers?
If you have a story about how you pivoted careers into a more holistic position for yourself, I’d love to hear from you! Send me an email.
Looking for guidance in your career change?
If this episode has piqued your interest, but you feel like you could really use some extra support figuring out how to bring more alignment to your career, I’d love to speak with you. You can sign up for a free consultation call with me to see if coaching would be a good fit for you.
