How do you figure out what to do with your career?

How to do it:

Get yourself along to conferences and seminars, read the trade press, blogs, and social media in the areas that interest you, approach the people who write and speak a lot.

Ask everyone you talk to for connections to 2 or 3 peers in the same field, so your network grows organically and you can reduce the amount of cold approaches you have to make.

Be prepared to try out things, perhaps working for free, interning, freelancing, volunteering. It depends on how big the transition you are making is, but the bigger it is, the more likely that you will need to build career capital in this way.

You’ll also learn where you have gaps in your skills, and how best to address these. This is much less risky than taking a guess at what you need to do, and then spending a lot of money on qualifications that turn out to be irrelevant.

How long will it take? The maths:

In my experience, you’ll need to talk to around 150 people to form a good picture of a new career area.

5 people a week is 30 weeks to get to 150.

20-30% of people will be helpful, so you need to message something like 20-30 people to get 5 conversations a week.

I always suggest job seekers do this incrementally; i.e. aim to have conversations every week. What you learn in week one, you can take to week two. The new ideas you develop, or new information you gather in one set of conversations, you can share with new people the following week.

Learning compounds this way, and after 30 weeks you’ll be talking more like an industry insider. In other words, you’ll be a much stronger candidate for a job.