Too often, a layoff comes out of left field, sending you reeling. Because our natural inclination is to find something else as quickly as possible, most job seekers tend to continue down the path they’re on as they look for a new role. But what if you could leverage your transferable skills and do something different?
Just because you’ve always been in marketing or operations or education doesn’t mean you have to stay in those fields. A previous trajectory toward leadership might not feel like the next best thing, and perhaps you’d rather go back to being an individual contributor. The good thing is that careers are not always linear, and you can choose to view a layoff as an opportunity to head in a different direction.
Your Experience Is a Foundation, not a Box
Over the course of a career, most professionals accumulate skills that extend well beyond their official job descriptions. A project manager may become exceptionally good at influencing without authority. A sales leader may develop sophisticated negotiation and relationship-building skills. An HR executive may be an outstanding organizational change strategist. An operations leader may know how to improve processes, manage risk, and lead teams through disruption. Those capabilities don’t disappear because the next job has a different title.
This is where transferable skills become important. Those include the knowledge, capabilities, and experience you can take from one role, industry, or environment and apply somewhere else. Some are technical. Others—leadership, communication, problem-solving, strategic thinking, relationship management, change management, and decision-making—can be valuable across a surprisingly wide range of roles. The challenge is recognizing them. And that process isn’t always easy when you’re the person whose career is under review.
Stop Searching Only by Job Title
Job titles can be useful search tools, but they can also create blinders. Two organizations can use completely different titles for essentially the same work. Conversely, two people with the same title can have dramatically different responsibilities. That’s why it can be helpful to step back from the title and ask a different question:
What problems do I know how to solve?
Maybe your previous role involved managing a large department, but your deeper expertise may be building high-performing teams, improving inefficient processes, developing leaders, or managing complex organizational change. Those capabilities could have applications far beyond your previous title.
A sales executive might look beyond “VP of sales” and consider roles in revenue operations, strategic partnerships, business development, customer success, or even consulting. If you were in finance, your next position could be in strategic planning, operations, business transformation, or corporate development. And an experienced recruiter might move into talent strategy, executive coaching, workforce consulting, or HR technology.
The point isn’t to convince yourself that you can do anything; it’s to recognize that you may be qualified for more than one thing. And that’s where the excitement lies.
Look for the Job Next Door
One of the easiest ways to expand a job search is to look at adjacent roles. An adjacent role isn’t necessarily a complete career reinvention. It’s often a position that uses many of the skills you’ve already developed—while introducing a new responsibility, industry, customer, or business problem. Think of it as the job next door rather than in a completely different neighborhood.
For example, someone who has spent years leading internal communications might explore employee experience, change management, or employer branding. A supply chain professional might consider procurement, operations strategy, or logistics consulting. A technology leader might explore product strategy, transformation, or technology advisory work.
The closer the connection between your existing experience and the new opportunity, the easier it may be to explain your value. And sometimes that explanation is the key.
Employers don’t necessarily need someone who has held the exact same title before. They need someone who can solve the problems they’re facing. Your job is to help them see that you can, sometimes by leaning into those transferable skills.
One of our clients who is targeting chief revenue officer positions recently had a conversation with a company not about CRO roles but about roles that specifically leverage his transferable skills. His background is valuable because of all the things he’s had to do in the past. That’s what this potential employer was reviewing.
Changing Industries May Be More Possible than You Think
Changing industries can feel like a much bigger leap, particularly when you’ve spent most of your career in one sector. But industries have more overlap than job seekers sometimes realize.
A healthcare organization still needs financial leaders, marketers, technology professionals, HR executives, and operations experts. A technology company still needs salespeople, project managers, finance professionals, and people who understand customers. A nonprofit still needs leaders who can build teams, manage budgets, develop strategy, and execute programs.
Your industry knowledge may be valuable, but it’s not necessarily your only source of value. The question to ask yourself, then, is: Which of my skills are industry-specific, and which are portable? That distinction can open up possibilities.
It may also help you decide whether a complete industry change makes sense—or whether an adjacent industry would give you the best combination of familiarity and opportunity.
In some cases, you might choose to change the industry because that’s where your goal is, even if you can’t get directly to your ideal position. Another of our clients has recent experience in high-level administration and wants to be a college professor, so her consultant encouraged her to look for opportunities in university administration. That puts her in the industry, and she can develop relationships and position herself for future teaching roles.
Sometimes the Opportunity Doesn’t Look Like an Opportunity
Another reason professionals can overlook possibilities is that they are waiting for a job description to tell them exactly what they’re qualified to do. Job descriptions don’t always make that easy.
A company may use terminology you don’t recognize. A role may combine responsibilities you’ve previously handled across several different positions. Or a position may have a title you’ve never held but involve work you’ve been doing for years.
This is where it helps to read job descriptions for patterns, rather than matching every bullet point. Look for the underlying capabilities.
- What is the organization trying to accomplish?
- What problems does this person need to solve?
- What kind of leadership does the role require?
- Who are the stakeholders?
- What experience appears repeatedly?
Then compare those needs with your own experience. You may discover a much stronger match than the title initially suggested.
This Is Where an Outside Perspective Helps
There’s an interesting paradox in career transition: The more established you become in your career, the harder it can sometimes be to see your own possibilities.
You’ve spent years building expertise in a particular area. You know what you’re good at, and you have a professional identity that has been reinforced by your title, industry, and reputation. That’s valuable, but it can also make it difficult to imagine yourself differently.
A career consultant can bring an outside perspective to that process. Instead of simply asking, “What job do you want?” a good career consultant can help you examine your experience from several angles:
- What are your strongest capabilities?
- Which accomplishments demonstrate them?
- Where else could those skills create value?
- What roles might you be overlooking?
- What would it take to make a transition credible?
Sometimes the answer isn’t a completely new career. It could be a better understanding of the career you already have.
Position Yourself for the Direction You Want to Go
Once you’ve identified a potential new direction, your career materials need to support it. And this is where many career changers run into trouble. Their resume accurately documents where they’ve been, but it says very little about where they’re going.
If you’re pursuing a new type of role, you may need to change the emphasis of your resume. Instead of simply documenting your past, consider:
- Which accomplishments are most relevant?
- Which transferable skills should be prominent?
- What language does the new industry or function use?
- Which experiences demonstrate that you can succeed in this environment?
Your LinkedIn profile needs to tell the same story. And eventually, you’ll need to tell that story in conversation. That’s not about pretending you’ve done something you haven’t. It’s about connecting the dots between what you have done and what you are prepared to do next.
A strong career transition story sounds something like:
Here’s what I’ve accomplished, here’s what I’ve learned, here’s the capability I’m bringing forward, and here’s why it matters in this next environment.
That’s a much more compelling story than, “I’m trying to do something different.”
Give Yourself Permission to Explore
There is one more important piece of this conversation: You don’t have to know the answer immediately. A layoff can create enormous pressure to figure out the next step quickly, but exploration is not wasted time. It can be part of a thoughtful job search.
Talk to people doing work that interests you. Ask how they got there. Research companies and industries. Look at job descriptions. Pay attention to roles that make you think, I hadn’t considered that. And network beyond the people who have always known you in the same professional context.
You may discover that your next opportunity isn’t a slightly different version of your previous job. It may be an adjacent role, a new industry, a consulting opportunity, a leadership position you hadn’t considered, or something that doesn’t yet have a place in the career plan you originally imagined. That’s all okay.
The goal of a career transition isn’t necessarily to recreate the past. It’s to understand what you’ve built, recognize what you can carry forward, and identify where those capabilities can take you next. Your next job doesn’t have to look like your last one; it just needs to make sense for where you’re going.
About Transition Solutions
At Transition Solutions, we understand that career transition is about more than finding another job with the same title. Our experienced consultants help individuals evaluate their experience, identify transferable skills, explore possibilities and develop practical strategies for moving forward.
For more than 35 years, we have been helping companies and individuals navigate workforce changes with personalized coaching, innovative technology and practical career strategies.
Learn more at transitionsolutions.com, call 888-424-0003, or email info@transitionsolutions.com. You can also connect with Transition Solutions on LinkedIn.