Career transition creates opportunities for the organisation and the employee. Effective transition sends a positive cultural message to the organisation and establishes the right settings for a supportive Alumni to develop. AspireTM provides career transition support allowing you to select the program features that are right for your departing employee.
The AspireTM Career Transition and Outplacement Service (OPC) provides the essential nexus between internal Talent Management strategies and the external employment market for people who are exiting the organisation. OPC is an effective outplacement service that supports people through change and seeks to reframe careers as an open or market-based system.
You can register by clicking the link below, or contact your company representative to access all areas of this site and make an appointment with one of our experienced OPC Specialists.
3 Career Strategies
Strategy 1 - "Job Continuation".
Not surprisingly, Job Continuation (JC) is the most common outcome following a redundancy or other reason to consider a change at work. JC is the right strategy for people who work in organisations that are big enough to provide the "traditional" career progression, from entry/graduate level, project experience, increasing responsibilities and perhaps a role in managing others.
On paper, this career progression looks a little like a staircase, with each step heralding a change in status, pay and responsibilities. Of course, at some point a plateau is achieved and it is this career plateau that can come into focus during holidays!
If your career strategy looks like this, it is essential to match your activities to reflect JC and also to gain a better understanding of the reality of this career path. "Traditional" career progression only applies to around 50% of workers (with ABS data revealing a much higher proportion of Australian workers in businesses with 1-4 workers), and of course, only a small percentage will be promoted to CEO!
Strategy no.2 - "Career Change"
Career change (CC) is an altogether different case. It is not as simple as changing jobs and rather than looking like a staircase, it looks much more like a grid. This "grid" has the characteristics of the job role on one axis, and the characteristics of the organisation on the other axis. The further we go from our current role in either direction, the more steps it may take you to get there.
Practically speaking, CC requires longer-term planning and a series of steps to successfully achieve a viable new career in a new field. A behavioural preference tool (often referred to as a "personality test") can be very helpful in predicting how well the new career will suit you, and in some cases can also assist in predicting success in this new field.
Tackling the challenges of CC is very common for people in their mid-career years. As we mentioned above, sometimes careers do appear to "plateau" after we gain some experience and there is nothing wrong with this. It is when our actions start to veer away from the JC strategy that we call into question whether the current job is still helping us to achieve our goals.
Strategy 3 - "Self-employment"
After seeing literally thousands of people through career transitions, we have only ever made one change to this model, and that was to rename the "entrepreneur" strategy as "self-employment" or "SE". SE involves risk, the use of your own capital, and in some cases, the imperative to sell something.
It is very common for mid-career workers to wonder if they could start a new business successfully, particularly if their job has been disrupted through unexpected redundancy. People are generally very clear about their desire to work for themselves. Those who were "born" to run their own business are easy to spot! For those who don't see themselves as a salesperson, or are very risk averse, the very idea fills them with dread.
That said, exploring safe ways to develop entrepreneurial skills in a safe environment is very useful. Our advice is to explore entry to SE in a step-wise and circumspect manner. This can include developing a "side hustle" that doesn't compete with your day job, helping someone else with their start-up to gain experience and see what really happens, or even to take a greater interest in the work of family and friends to expand your experience base.
A final word
Each of the strategies requires a different set of actions, and it is our experience that the problems begin when our behaviour no longer matches our strategy. Always consider a "blend of strategies" that allows you to explore new options while keeping one foot on the ground.