Hello everyone! I have now spent so long not talking about “quiet quitting” that they have invented an entirely new set of words like “quiet firing”, and “quiet-cations”. I am very happy to sit out the “quiet-ification” of things.
Let’s talk about career changes this week. The specific thing that I want to talk about today is how time-in-role affects changing careers.
I want to add that I have discussed this very thing with a half dozen or so people who were contemplating changing careers. The more time you have invested in your current career, the harder it becomes. This is especially true if your career transition is not a level up either. For example, if you wanted to change from game engineer to game producer, you might have an adjacent skill set and some familiarity with how the role works through your interactions with your peers, but not enough actual experience in that role directly.
If you are contemplating changing roles at your existing employer, you might have a compensation structure that has you more highly paid than other people in the profession you are looking to switch to. This might make it hard for a department to want to absorb your salary into their budget. If you decided to contemplate a pay cut to accommodate that issue, then you have made it moderately demoralizing for yourself.
The same challenge exists if you were going to negotiate your compensation structure at a new company. I think the difference here, for the candidate, is that there is a clean break from the existing team and it makes the difficult pill of a decreased compensation package an easier one to swallow.
I am talking about the compensation element as the most important part here because if you were going the other way, there is much less to talk about—just go get that new job! I spoke last week about the value of my software engineering degree to me, and I left some breadcrumbs for doing a gap analysis for what a role in software engineering might require from you. You can find similar discussions all over the internet for what skills you will need in other professions. If you are truly stuck trying to find some materials to assist you, then send me an email and I will see if I can help you.
So let’s construct a hypothetical career shift. Let’s say I was a senior software engineer and I wanted to become a games producer.
If I go tap the Google for data on “Senior Engineer in Austin Texas”, I am seeing a 100k to 150k salary listed on most sites, with one site claiming 80k to 210k. If I look at “Senior Producer in Austin Texas”, the same sites say 60k to 130k, with one outlier of 110k to 170k.
There is a salary gap here that might be easy to cross in some situations. I bring this up because the next question is “Can you transfer your Senior credentials from Engineering to Production?”
If you are looking to make the jump from Senior Software Engineer to “non-Senior” Producer, you are looking at a much bigger gap. This is going to be true for a large number of roles, and largely what everyone is going to expect. You will have to mentally prepare yourself for a decrease in pay, or else figure out how you can negotiate that rate higher based on what skills you consider transferable. You will also need to navigate the team environment. There may be other people who are in that role who develop resentment if you show up to learn a new role with above average compensation. This is a very real thing.
I have run engineering teams where I have assigned “senior engineers” to assist “principal engineers” who are new to the team. On some teams there is a high percentage of people who feel that helping someone above their current role is insulting because, as someone with a fancier title, they ought to know everything they need to know. It is important for the less senior engineer in this opportunity to be aware that this is a growth moment for them, and they are being given a tremendous opportunity to help a new member of the team get up to speed and learn the particulars of the current product and software stack. I digress for a moment here because, as an engineering manager, this is a tool you can use to see who is really ready for a promotion based on people’s emotional responses to onboarding new members. The same principal will apply here for someone changing careers.
So now that we have talked about the compensation and some of the issues with seniority and transferable skills, what can you do about it? This is an excellent question! Here are some things I would recommend:
Write up a gap analysis: Do your homework on what you need to be successful in your new role. Make a list of all of the responsibilities and give yourself a rating from 0 to 5 on each of the areas. Where possible, ask someone who is in that profession right now for a second opinion and encourage them to be very honest with their review. Once you know what your gaps are, you can speak to how you are going to address them.
Coursework/certification: This is an excellent way to help cement a transition from one role to another. Whether you are hustling and doing this after hours or on weekends or taking a gap between roles, the value of education and training is clear to many potential employers.
Independent projects: If you have less disposable time and more disposable income, you can just practice your new role. Do you want to be a designer? Pay someone to build your game. Similarly true for producers. I have designed, produced, and funded a handful of products over my career. Most of them have accomplished their goals, and many of them stayed within budget and time constraints. As an example, I tell people who want to migrate from software engineer to software designer they will have more success getting an interview for a design job if they do not build the project themselves. I stand by this. I have been handed too many resumes from other hiring managers saying “before I look at this person for a designer role, you might want to look at them as an engineer. Look at this stuff they built!”
Get your foot in the door if you need to: Related to the last point, you might not have an opportunity to transfer to a new role at your current company. You might find there are other employers who are more accomodating. You can ask about opportunities to change roles as a part of the interview problem and start at your new company giving them the benefit of your existing skill set while preparing to transition. Be careful that they do not change their position after hiring you. When interviewing at a company that says they are flexible with roles, it might make sense to ask to speak to someone who went through a role transition already. This is a good way to find out how smooth or friction-filled that process is.
Part time transition: If you are working in a highly demanded role, you have no downside in asking if you can start taking on additional roles and splitting your time between them. An intelligent manager knows that this question is essentially a resignation. The real question is: “Do I keep this individual for two weeks, or nine months?” Coming up with a plan to transition to a new role will also let other people in the organization know that the company cares about your own goals and is willing to help people chase their passions and interests.
Role adjacency: If you are struggling with finding exactly what you are looking for, then you should consider adjusting your role to establish a new local maximum. I joined a sales team as a sales engineer for a period of time early on in my career. It was a transformative moment for me because I learned quite a bit about business development, sales funnels, and closing deals. It made it easier for me to explore other roles later in life because it let me demonstrate some level of “not an engineer” when I needed to. If you are stuck getting typecast to a specific role by potential employers, try to find a role that is in a different team. Demonstrating you can thrive in an alternative (but more adjacent) role will also help show you can successfully transition to the new role you are looking for because you have experience making career changes.
Find a mentor: After everything else, see if you can find someone who is already in the profession you desire who is willing to mentor you. They can help with all of the previous points as well as eventually provide you with a direct opportunity to make the transition some day.
Thank you for reading along! There are probably a dozen other things you can do to take yourself closer to a desired career. I would love to hear your stories if you have them. I can see well over a dozen people on LinkedIn who have made successful transitions over the course of my career, and in some cases I helped them along that path.
We are coming into the end of the year, and I have a full slate of engineering leadership articles, as well as my annual holiday poem, to share with you. I am also watching the web3 space a little and may post some thoughts on this whole new “zero royalty” movement that just started. I am not happy about it. It is one of those things that makes web3 interesting. I guess I am grateful they did not call it “quiet royalties?”
