How I Changed Careers After Losing My Job and Home at 30

Five lessons that can help you make a successful career change

I believed I had done everything right.

I paved my way through business school, getting an MBA, and landing a job at a major corporation. But a few years later, things started to change. The department I was in went through redundancy rounds — my team went from 250 people to 12. I began to explore new roles within the company but found that what I’d been doing in my career was so specialized that it wasn’t transferable to other, more conventional roles.

At that moment, I realized my career was going nowhere. I’d given responsibility for my future over to someone else.

It has been four years since my career change, and I have a far more exciting career, with more options open to me than if I had stayed where I was.

If you find yourself considering a career change, here are the five lessons I learned from my transition. I hope you find them helpful as you plan your next steps.

The first thing I did was spend a lot of time reflecting on my strengths and what work I felt most inflow doing. I started by listing out all the skills I had acquired throughout my career to date.

I then emailed 5 friends and 5 people I had worked with, asking them to email me a list of what they thought my top 5 skills were. Getting feedback from people who knew me at different stages in my life was interesting and generated some very different feedback, but common themes also emerged.

Using these commonalities, cross-referenced against my own list, I came up with the following five skills:

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