How do you get a career change?

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1. Putting in an application where you want to work does wonders for starting that

2. 1. Find jobs you want in a different career.

   2. Determine what skills/education they require.

   3. Note the gaps between that and your current experience.

   4. Fill those gaps as much as practical.

   5. Make new resumes and apply to jobs.

3. First, figure out what you want to do next. Then apply to jobs you think you can get with your current experience and skillset. Or you can go back to school and study the subject matter to earn a degree in the field.

4. I transitioned gradually. I was in IT (sys/netadmin) for a while and doing a bit of tinkering with programming on the side (and some on the job) for years. Then I got a chance to write some real software while my main job didn’t consume all my time. That started my portfolio and I went on to make a good career in software development.

   Other people might go to night school to do something similar.

   Skills transfer more than you might think. Soft skills, mainly. Don’t underestimate the importance of soft skills in a job. They can make or break you. In my job, soft skills would be like the Linux commandline. I don’t NEED to know bash and related tools well to do my actual job, but when all the servers that run your software are Linux, it really pays off some times to know the system well for troubleshooting and debugging purposes. And just setting up a dev environment can be challenging if you don’t know the operating system you’re working on well. Or networking.

5. There are some career change books that may be helpful, two that come to mind are “designing your life” and “what color is your parachute”

6. Apply for a new job.

   Probably a good idea to pick your favourite potential career, learn the requirements and work to meet them before applying, though some organisations have long enough recruitment processes to allow you to do a good bit of the work after applying.

7. Figure out what you need to do the new job and go do it.

   I’ve gone from manual labor(lumber yard), to working in an office, to retail, to being a chemist. While getting the chem degree I also got a teacher certification that I could have gone on to be a teacher. A few years back I also considered going into a pharmacy program.