Career transition services are an effective way of ensuring life-long preparedness for career change or advancement. While it is easy to remain in a comfort zone especially if you enjoy your role, have a high level of responsibility and receive a good salary, it can prove a fine line between being comfortable and stagnating. The downside of staying in a position too long is that it makes the next move more difficult. Your career may have hit a plateau, skills may be out-of-date and out of sync with market demands.
Even if it is not time to move, talking to a executive career transition expert who can advise and help prepare you for the next move can be extremely beneficial. This means that, when a suitable opening does position, you are already equipped with the skills and experience required to be considered for the role.
By taking this proactive rather than reactive approach to executive career management, you can transition more smoothly and comfortable into a future role.
Areas to consider when going through your executive career transition:
1 Gain market insight
Maybe you want to remain in your current sector all career long or perhaps you are interested in finding what opportunities might exist to diversify? Either way, it is important to obtain solid market insight and intelligence on what is happening in those executive job markets. Who are the major players? How healthy is the sector? Is it likely to be hit by digital disruption? How competitive are the salaries? What skills are in demand? Working with a career transition expert can help provide access to this knowledge far more easily and help you reach informed and data-driven decisions about your next and future career moves. At Rialto, we also look at the “third horizon” by carrying out a market scan to understand what skills might be needed in three years’ time or more.
2 Leadership profiling and benchmarking
It is essential to have a clear picture of how your skills, knowledge and experience rate in the market. How relevant are they to the current challenges faced by organisations? Benchmarking yourself against those in similar positions is one of the most effective ways of doing this but it can be time-consuming. Tools such as the Rialto Accelerated Leadership Index (RALI) take the legwork out of the exercise though as it uses real-time data to profile and assess the alignment of a leader’s current capability and experience to future market needs and to those of their competitors.
3 Positioning your personal brand
You must think strategically about personal brand if you are to realistically position yourself in the market. This can be difficult to do in isolation as it involves taking a 360-degree assessment of yourself and how you are perceive by others. And remember that as well as face-to-face interactions, your brand and reputation is also shaped by your digital footprint left on networks such as Linkedin, blogs and YouTube videos. The touchpoints that digital media has opened up offer huge scope to enhance a brand. Positioning personal brand involves applying the same strategic thinking to yourself as you would the business. What are your unique selling points? How are you seen in the market? Who are your chief competitors and what do they offer that you don’t? A career transition adviser can act as a sounding board to answer these questions as well as provide executive coaching to help develop and polish your personal brand.
4 Access to networks
Love it or loath it, networking is one of the most powerful ways to hear about potential opportunities or connect with people who can play an instrumental role in your next move. Online networking is important but there is far more to the art of networking than just having a profile on Linkedin and reaching out to contacts in the hope of being noticed. It does occur, but this is only one strand of a networking strategy. A good career transition expert can help with high-level face-to-face networking, connecting you to the right networks and provide advice on the type of people with whom you should be connecting.
5 Broaden your horizons
Career journeys no longer need to be linear and can take sideways and different directions depending on your aspirations and what else is happening in your life at that time. It can be difficult to identify what options might be available but also what impact such a move may have on your overall career aspirations. For example, Rialto has often advised individuals wishing to change career direction to address work-life balance issues. Similarly, you may have entrepreneurial aspirations and are unlikely to get the experience required to launch a business venture in your current organisation. Career transition services can also help individuals to develop portfolio careers when the time is right such as securing non-executive director roles.
Rialto Consultancy delivers a range of career transition, leadership development and coaching programmes for executives and senior leaders. For more information, please call 020 3746 2960 or go to https://www.rialtoconsultancy.com/contact/ to fill out the contact form.
To benchmark your leadership profile for free, visit https://ralionline.com/
