Question - Should you spend 50 hours preparing to swap careers?

How long should you spend reaching out to the relevant people in a field you’re interested in? Here are our top tips on time management.

Question: If somebody wanted to transition career, how many hours would you advise them to invest in talking to practitioners in their chosen field? Would 50 hours be enough?

If you want to make the transition in a year (perhaps you are about to start the final year of a degree), 50 hours means 1 hour a week starting this week. Yep, you get two weeks off.

An hour of somebody’s time is a lot to ask for, so you should go for two 30-minute conversations, or three 20-minute conversations a week. Which would give you 100 or 150 new connections respectively (and all of them could be potential advocates for you in a hiring process).

Does making the connections sound like a lot of work? It gets easier as your network grows. And as you learn about your new field, the conversations get more and more in depth – and valuable to you.

After 50 hours of these conversations, how much stronger do you think you would be as a candidate?

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