How I Successfully Pivoted into a New Career Field During a Recession
What to do to pivot your profession during a bad job market.
When you’re wanting to break into a new career field – whether you’re currently employed or you’ve been out of the workforce for a while – it can be an intimidating and uncertain prospect.
Where do you even start? (If you’re trying to reenter the workforce, discover career relaunch programs for women).
And during times like this where it seems like every week we’re hearing about another mass layoff, it may even seem bleak. But I want to give you hope because it is possible! I know – I’ve done it before!
I pivoted my career during a time when there was a recession, jobs were scarce, and the jobs that were available paid next to nothing. It wasn’t easy – it took grit and persistence – but it happened.
My hope is that for those of you who are looking to pivot your career or to relaunch your career after an extended break, you will find actionable ideas in this post that will progress your job search strategy.
Before I jump into my story, I want to give you a highlight of the actions I took to break into a new field:
Identified my career interests and career values;
Researched fields that had my career values;
Connected with people who were already in that field (networking);
Researched grad school programs;
Assessed my personal finances and ability to fund grad school;
Leaned into my natural grit to take on extra (and at the time, unpaid) work through an internship to gain experience and develop my resume.
starting point…
I graduated college in 2009 after the 2008 crash. There was so much uncertainty. I already knew at that point that what I had earned my bachelor’s degree in – social work – was not what I wanted to do. But I also knew that I had put myself through college and I had $50,000 in student loan debt, so it was too late to backtrack.
I needed a job and I needed to use the degree I had to increase my chances of getting that job. So, I did. And the entire time I was pursuing a job in social work, I was also doing my research to figure out what I really wanted to do.
Side note: if you’re trying to figure out what your next steps are in life, including your career, a good resource that didn’t exist at the time that I was trying to pivot my career is Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, and The Designing Your Life Workbook!
This was a book my team read when I worked in the Career Services field at a university and one that we recommended to students.
It’s a great book for anyone to read, particularly if you’re not sure where to begin. (One Skilled Mama does receive a commission for this book. This doesn’t impact you as the consumer in any way. Amazon just gives OSM a little money out of its profits).
Burnett and Evans are professors at Standford who created the Designing Your Life course, one of the university’s most popular elective classes.
To provide the class-content to people outside of Stanford, they wrote this book! It looks at life from a designer’s perspective. It breaks down flawed (yet common) ways of thinking that most of us have from an early age, such as that whatever you majored in at college will be your career. It then looks at how these beliefs are holding us back through our ability (or lack thereof) to identify problems, how we can reframe them to better understand what the problem is and what control we have over them, and the steps we can take to change our situation. It ties all of this back to our own personal views on life and work, what is important to us as individuals, and our current status in different life categories.
Now, back to my story.
I’ve always had good business sense, so I leaned into that. I started researching different areas of business and the more I learned about Human Resources, the more interested I became. It seemed to be the perfect combination of my interests in business and working with people.
I then talked to a sorority sister and another friend who were currently working in HR to get their perspective on the field as a whole – what they liked and what they didn’t – as well as if they thought it would be a good fit for my personality and interests (they did).
The next step…
Once I determined that HR was where I wanted to pivot my career, I then began looking into grad school programs.
I needed to figure out the money part of it because, as I mentioned earlier, I already had a sizeable amount of student loan debt, and I hardly made any money. Financing was a concern. But my employer offered an education reimbursement program, so I looked into that.
The reimbursement program would have covered 75% of my graduate school costs, which sounded amazing! But I had to stay at the job for 6 months for every semester they covered. That would mean had I started my grad program right then, I would have had to have worked there for at least an additional two years.
I had been at this job for almost a year at that point, and I was already stressed out beyond belief. I was getting to the office anywhere between 6:30 am and 7:30 am and I wasn’t leaving until at least 8 pm, but sometimes not until close to midnight!
And during that time, I was driving around a lot in the community, visiting clients’ homes, and dealing with very serious situations. My mental health was already taking a toll. But I thought that if I could be guaranteed a transfer into the HR Department after I graduated, I might be able to tough it out.
So, my next step was to talk to my department’s HR Generalist.
I met with her, explained my interest, and she encouraged me to pursue HR.
The problem was that she said that there were several people at the agency who were interested in doing the same I was thinking about, and if they graduated with their degrees before me, they would be first in line for getting the next HR job. So not only was there no guarantee that I would be able to transfer into HR shortly after I graduated, but it could be several years until the next opportunity became available.
Money & getting comfortable with being uncomfortable…
I decided that while financially it would be the most affordable to fund my graduate degree if I were to stay with that agency, overall, it wasn’t the best course for me.
This was an incredibly hard decision because I am very financially oriented. I had to get comfortable with something that made me uncomfortable – going with the least financially secure option. I knew I needed to get out of that job, though, for the sake of my mental well-being, so I decided to focus on finding another less stressful social worker job.
I eventually found one through a friend and fellow social worker (networking), and the more stable hours and predictable routine would allow me to work full-time while completing grad school.
To make a dent in the student loans I already had, I got a second, part-time job cleaning offices. I worked that job for about seven months, paying off some of my loans, which gave me more breathing room to take on financing grad school.
During that time, I spoke with four different HR grad programs to get a better understanding of the curriculum, the reputation they had within the HR world, and their cost. I found myself stuck because there was something about each program I liked, but none of them felt like they were the right one for me.
Tap into your network, even people you don’t know well, to help transition your career.
Networking…
Then I found out that my new employer’s HR Director completed a grad program that I hadn’t looked at. It had the flexibility I needed and it was a reputable, well-known school.
At this point, I had been at my new employer for about eight months and I had only had a handful of interactions with this HR Director, but I reached out to her, explained my situation, and asked her if she would recommend that program. I was just expecting her to respond to my e-mail with a yes or no and why, but I got so much more.
Before I go on, I want to highlight that what happened next is the power of communication and networking. You never know where a conversation is going to lead!
She suggested that we meet for dinner to talk about it, which led to me determining that this grad program was the right one. Even more exciting, it also led to me completing an internship with her during my off-time from my full-time job, which boosted my grad school application and my resume.
The internship transformed into her being my mentor as well as us becoming friends. This, in turn, then led me to meeting my husband – he was a friend of her husband’s! The domino effect of this situation was incredible, and I’m not even done yet!
After I had started grad school, the HR Director got a new job, so I was hired by my employer to replace her as an HR Generalist! I got my first HR job without having yet completed my degree.
Another pivot…
But it didn’t last long as life had different plans. After I had been in that role for about three months, the agency did a mass layoff, which included my position, and it eventually shut down altogether.
I felt so dejected. All of that hard work, all of that hustling to make things happen for what? Who was going to hire someone who only had an internship and three months of working experience in HR?
The economy and the job market, while a little better than they were when I graduated college, were still bleak. I was so afraid that I was going to have to get another social worker job and that my mental health was going to tank.
More networking and personal brand…
The good news was I was doing fantastic in grad school, so I asked my professors to write me letters of recommendation, which helped me land a few HR job interviews.
But as I said, the job market was still tight. Ultimately, I was out of work for four months. The savings I had scrimped and saved from my measly pay was just about gone.
I stayed in contact with my mentor and former HR Director, and she really pulled through for me again.
She was a one-person HR department at her new job and was overwhelmed. She started talking with her boss, the president of the company, about how she needed help and that she needed to hire another HR professional. I met her at work for lunch one day and she used that as an opportunity for me to meet him and some of the management team. The next week, her boss approved adding another HR person and I came in for a formal interview with him a few weeks after that.
It wasn’t a slam dunk though. There were other people interviewing for the job, so I still had to prove myself to him. I studied all things HR, especially the main aspects of the position I was applying for so that I could make up for my lack of hands-on experience.
The president was a very nice man, but he was also serious and a bit intimidating, and he put me through my paces. But, he told my mentor that of all the candidates who interviewed for the job, I came across as the most professional from the way I dressed for the interview to how I spoke. I got the job!
This is proof that preparing for an interview, thinking through your “look”, and being aware of your personal brand have an impact on landing a job even if you’re not the most qualified candidate.
I often think about how had I not reached out to the HR Director that day about grad school programs, not only would I have not gotten an internship that helped me get into grad school or met my husband, but I have no idea how long I would have been unemployed after I was laid off and I most likely would have had to become a social worker again.
I point this out to tell you to not get caught up in the worry, in the anxiety of how things will turn out. Just stay the course and believe in yourself. The exact path will work itself out in a way that you probably could have never guessed.
Career growth and coming full circle…
The new HR job I got was actually a step down from the one I had four months earlier, but I was okay with this because I barely had any experience and it was an excellent role that taught me a ton.
I also worked a lot – not quite the hours I was working at my first social worker job, but close. But because it was a less stressful field, it wasn’t bad. And I was hourly so I was earning a lot of overtime pay, which helped me pay off my car and more of my student loans from undergrad.
I was in that role for a year before I moved on to my next HR venture. I had one year of grad school down and another to go. The new job was a promotion back to an HR Generalist. I was making about what I did at my old job, but I had more normal business hours, so I didn’t have to deal with super early mornings, and the amount of late nights decreased drastically.
I was with this employer for a number of years during which time my career really grew. I graduated with my master’s degree, earned my professional HR certification, and started getting promoted until I reached the HR Manager level.
When I first started exploring the HR field as a possibility, I could not have seen my career journey unfolding this way. I had no idea how I was going to take a bachelor’s degree in social work and a resume with next to nothing on it in general, much less in HR, and build an HR career.
But, I didn’t need to figure out the how. I just needed to identify logical action steps that could put me in front of people who could either offer advice or who could help me. I’m an introvert, so the idea of reaching out to people I barely knew or didn’t know at all, to ask them for this advice and help was highly uncomfortable. But I did it anyway and it paid off.
In fact, you know the HR Generalist I talked to at the social work agency of my first job? The one who encouraged me to pursue HR but let me know that the possibility of me transferring into the agency’s HR department right after completing grad school was slim? Well, after I had left the agency and I was halfway through my grad school program, I reconnected with her for help I needed on a project (more networking)! To put it in perspective, that was about two years after our initial conversation. Then, fast forward six years later, and I actually returned to that agency to work in the HR Department and she was my co-worker!
Life is weird. Which is a good thing. Don’t count yourself out because it seems like all of the odds are stacked against you. Don’t focus on the entire road ahead and try to plan it out, because it won’t happen that way anyway. Just focus on your first step, then the step after that, and so on.