Five Tips for Career Transitions

Illustration: Jozef Micic/shutterstock.com

By Kelly Jordan

Making a career change can be an anxiety-provoking exercise that can spawn feelings of inadequacy, uncertainty, and fear. Yet, it is sometimes required and often recommended (particularly as it relates to boosting your income potential). With federal cuts impacting the public health job market, some workers have been forced to look for new jobs while others may be considering whether a transition best aligns with their personal career goals and financial needs.

The Rollins Alumni Association recently hosted a career webinar on the topic, featuring alumni who had each made several career pivots. The overarching advice from the panelists can be summarized into five major areas.

Consider Your Personal Needs and Values

When identifying whether to leave your organization or to pursue a job elsewhere—in the same industry, or beyond—it’s worth the effort to reconsider your personal values and to question your motivation. What is the thing that drives you to work in your current field? Is it the hope that you’ll improve maternal health outcomes, for instance?

Where do you receive personal validation at work? Is it important to you that you get to be creative in a job, that you make a certain amount of money, or that you have flexibility to attend your children’s after-school events? All can impact which route you take and what career change may make the most sense for you.

“Something that served as a bit of an arc for my career was examining the question, ‘where am I and where would I like to be?’” says Karen Fogg, program officer for international health at  Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies. “My highest priority in this most recent transition was making sure I landed in a place where my personal and professional public health ethics and values were supported.”

Think Methodically About Your Transition

Utilize your public health training to assess available data to identify which roles make sense for your goals and personal and family needs, and then put your research skills to work. Identify your strengths and the types of activities you enjoy doing—they may not be the same thing.

Cast a wide net at the types of roles that appeal to you. Look for organizations hiring for those roles and learn what you can about their values and how they align with your own.

Become a Networking Guru

See if you can identify contacts at those organizations on LinkedIn through personal connections that you can invite for coffee or a 10-minute phone call to get a sense for the company’s culture, the industry itself (if it’s outside of what you know), and potential job openings. Don’t ask for more than 10 minutes from this contact.

Look for professional organizations or groups in the field you want to be working in. For instance, if you’re an epidemiologist, but may want to transition to working in tech, look for groups that do that. Or, if that group currently does not exist, think about starting one.

Keep yourself open to opportunities by staying active online and off. Encourage conversation with friends and acquaintances. You can consider joining local networking groups, your neighborhood association, or other social or interest groups in your area, too.

“When I was thinking about making a transition and going into a market that I did not know, I was so methodical about it,” says Fogg, who changed career sectors and cities. “I really went out and identified networking sources. There's a couple of professional networks here in town that I methodically put in a spreadsheet, put the links in for their job pages, and focused on who might have jobs available for me.” She notes that putting in this work helped her identify the organization she works for now.

“It helps you understand what the possibilities are and identify the major players.”

Your Soft Skills Are Important, Too

Public health graduates are strong at analytical thinking, data collection, epidemiology, literature review, and more. Those hard skills are directly relatable to public health jobs, and jobs in other fields, too. But, soft skills may be equally important for success in the job market—especially in the private sector. Consider if your current role (if you are employed), offers opportunities to strengthen these skills, including areas like interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, and translating complex information to lay audiences.

Practicing communication and networking does not have to be formal and extends outside the office as well—and away from your phone. It can include talking with a neighbor. Engaging with another parent at your kid’s next soccer game. Those interactions can help you brush up on those soft skills, and practice talking to people you may not know well (something that comes in handy at job interviews, networking events, and new jobs). You never know where you might discover that next career opportunity or contact.

Give Yourself Some Grace

It takes time to learn the landscape of a new company, much less a new industry. There will be growing pains. You will probably make some mistakes, and that is ok.  

It is also ok to take a job just for the income—whether it’s more than what you make now, or less. Your value as a person is not equivalent to your job title or your income.