How to transition to the work you need

Our work changes. Sometimes, even if our job is still the same, our work can transform into a very different type.

Different works will be better or worse fits for our current needs.

So, how do you find the work that best fits your needs?

By building a solid set of competencies and skills.

Navigating job transitions when losing my father

I had just left my first role as a CTO. Honestly, things were in kind of a blur at that time.

My father had just had a hemorrhagic stroke, and my whole family was struggling to adjust. We spent nights at the hospital and days catching up on sleep.

I needed a position I could better balance with my new personal responsibilities, and I found a role as a Software Engineer instead of CTO. The problems I was solving were now technical and limited in scope, and I had more time and emotional energy to dedicate to my family.

A year after his stroke, my father passed away. That was another tough adjustment for me.

I was happy at work, and after processing my father's loss and its changes in my life, I was ready for a different role. Luckily, so was the company I was in, and I became their Head of Engineering.

Software Engineer and Head of Engineering were quite different types of work, but each was a better fit for what I needed at the time.

"Dui, I had a tough last couple of years.."

At least 3 people I talked to recently had the same remark: It's been tough.

People I know have lost their loved ones to COVID-19, cancer, and heart attacks, struggled with their own physical and mental health issues, and dealt with divorce and separation from their kids.

Additionally, companies are doing layoffs, and people are trying to find work with more financial and employment security, whether they're affected by layoffs or not.

So again, people find themselves navigating personal difficulties with potential job transitions.

Finding good work is challenging, but when navigating job searching, people tend to care about certain specific variables: The company, the salary, their manager..

These are all important, but often, the most crucial variable is one we never explicitly choose: the work itself.

There are many different works for us

Our work changes.

It changes as we learn new skills, our company grows, our career progresses, and our team increases. It can often change without changing our job title – especially at startups.

The amount of distinct valuable things we can do is not 1, even if you do a specific job now. We have a combination of competencies, which can be recombined into a different, still valuable role.

At my current company, many coworkers have recently changed their work:

• A player-coach manager is becoming a full-time manager
• An executive is focusing on long-term strategy and delegating day-to-day
• An architect is taking over a team to design our micro-services strategy
• A data security engineer is taking on cross-team project management

All these changes come with significant changes to their day-to-day work. Half of those changes in work caused no change in job title.

Here are some other work change examples I've seen in prior companies:

• A biochemical analyst found a role as a software engineer
• A support rep found a different role as a product manager
• A sales leader became a product manager, then group product manager (manager of PMs)
• A curriculum specialist found a different role in customer success

The only common theme in these changes is that they found work that better aligned with their needs.

Some are looking for career progression, some for more fulfilling day-to-day interactions, some for more work-life balance, some for more interesting technical challenges, some want to talk to people more, some to talk to people less.

While there's some stigma to people changing their work, particularly if it's perceived to be in the "wrong direction," they're not the ones doing the work every day. You are.

So find work that better meets your needs.

Building career capital

How do we choose the work we want to do? By building career capital.

In the book So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport makes a great case for how your ability to control your work is based on your career capital: the number of rare and valuable things you can do.

THE CAREER CAPITAL THEORY OF GREAT WORK

- The traits that define great work are rare and valuable.

- Supply and demand says that if you want these traits you need rare and valuable skills to offer in return. Think of these rare and valuable skills you can offer as your career capital.

- The craftsman mindset, with its relentless focus on becoming “so good they can’t ignore you,” is a strategy well suited for acquiring career capital. This is why it trumps the passion mindset if your goal is to create work you love.

This is not some philosophical debate on the existence of passion or the value of hard work — I’m being intensely pragmatic: You need to get good in order to get good things in your working life, and the craftsman mindset is focused on achieving exactly this goal.

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (p. 48). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The "craftsman mindset" means focusing on the value you can create through your skills and competencies. In particular, you want to have rare and valuable skills.

And you must build those skills if you don't have them yet.

Identify and build your competencies

You only need some of the competencies necessary for a role to start performing in it, but you need to build them up quickly.

So it's crucial to know your skills and competencies and how they can help you find a role that better matches your needs.

It's often suggested to us to identify our strengths. Still, we either rarely stop to put them in writing, or we focus on character strengths like honesty and courage instead of competencies and skills like project management and programming.

For this exercise, though, take an hour or two to write down the answers to the question: "What are my strengths when it comes to competencies and skills?"

Instead of focusing on character traits like "I'm resilient" or "I'm easy to work with," focus on abilities and competencies you've developed in the past.

For example, you may say:

• I'm a strong business writer. I can write comprehensive documentation and compelling proposals.
• I'm a strong project manager. I know the most frequently used project management tools, can run meetings effectively, and ensure bottlenecks are identified and removed.
• I'm a strong public speaker. I can create inspiring presentations, capture the public's attention, and leave them with a core message.
• I'm an expert in the mobile space. I know what's happened and what is happening in the industry, who the players are, and what their strategies and risks are.

The list can go on. You can say: "I'm good at accounting, setting inspiring team goals, managing CRMs, frontend engineering, etc."

The conclusion will be one of two:

• You either realize you have a comprehensive set of skills and there are many potential roles you could shift yourself into
• Or you realize you don't have a comprehensive set of skills, in which case you should start building them

Skills and competencies are built, not born with. If your list of competencies is small, you can still identify competencies you should build to find the role you need and then start working on building them through knowledge and practice.

The more comprehensive your set of skills and competencies, and the more rare and valuable they are, the better equipped you will be to identify and land the work you need.