Looking to change your career into IT or another area of technology?

Are you looking to transition your career into IT or another IT skill area?

This can often be a challenging move but there’s some good tactics that you can start with….

Firstly what area do I want to go into? Knowing that you need a change is often the easy part but often working out what area to go into is the challenge.

It’s great to work out your strengths & weaknesses, what you’ve liked and not liked, some of your favourite projects or achievements at work over the past few years may highlight this… and to be truly honest with yourself. Some times talking to a career consultant can help this at the start of your journey.

Once you’ve worked this out what are the next steps?

Networking - Start networking within that area you’re looking to get into…if you’re looking to get into a BA / Product Owner role go to agile talks where these type of people hang out and ask them about their jobs. How did they get into their role? Ask family friends or colleagues who are in this particular job and go have a coffee with them - find out about how they got into it.

Meet-Up Groups, Institutes or associations - If it’s in Project Management for example join the PMI or if you want to focus more on Product Management becoming a Product Owner head a long to the Product Management meet-up group in Christchurch click here :-). This is where these people are and not only will you learn about your new trade but you might even make contacts that will get you hired.

Skills Based CV - This is a very powerful method of taking your skills / experiences from your previous work history and getting these at the top of your CV to ‘hit the reader in the face’ and make an impact. It’s also quite enlightening to really clarify if these are the things you really want to be doing in the next few years so it often can clarify your desires to get into this new field.

For a skills-based CV example from the NZ government careers page please click here.

Projects on your CV - Pulling out real life examples that you’ve already worked on can be a very powerful way of leveraging previous projects & experience into your new area of choice. It also gets you thinking in your current position of the types of projects, opportunities or training you should be putting your hand up for in your current role & organisation.

Just do it - Once you come up with a plan you’ll start to look at stuff differently with your ‘PM’ mindset or ‘designer hat’ on or whatever that may be and I often say if you enjoy (like or love even) what you do you’ll become very successful - sometimes it’s not always that easy but we can make changes to start edging your way towards the end goal…but we need to know what that end goal is and make a plan, a road map to follow. So get out there and make IT happen!!!!

I'm Paul, Founder & Principal Consultant of Sunstone, an IT Recruitment & HR company specialising in recruiting IT roles within software, web, mobile, blockchain, big data, infrastructure, security & networks in Christchurch & South Island of New Zealand.