If you are a millennial, then you have been born in a world where technology has become ubiquitous and you are probably accustomed to a rapidly changing and dynamic business environment. But how about older people in their late thirties, forties or fifties? They still have a long professional career ahead of them, but are probably not that prepared for what is coming…. Most of these generations, went through an education system and a social system that led them to believe that they could potentially have one and the same job for the rest of their life, or let’s say a few to be fair.

Times have changed. In the digital age, the speed of change has been constantly accelerating and as a consequence of this our business environment is rapidly changing as well. Organisational setups will become more dynamic and there will be more rapid changes in the workforce to accommodate business changes. To stay relevant and to avoid becoming a disposable asset you have to constantly learn and probably reinvent yourself a couple of times during the length of your professional career. For millennials this might be less of a problem, since they know this is coming, but for older generations, it is important to react and be ready for the change ahead. It is not too late to reinvent yourself.

I am myself in my mid-forties and I am in a sense lucky since I have been working with technology for most of my career, with Ericsson, a telecommunications infrastructure provider. So I am lucky that I could see some trends coming earlier than others, like the decline of the telecommunications industry or the emergence of over the top business models. But for the last 4-5 years I have been asking myself for how much longer I should stay in that industry. And at that age it is not always easy to leave… at the same time you know that sooner or later you will be left behind, so you need to prepare.

This is where my journey starts! A journey where I decided to reinvent myself, create a new me, develop new skills for the future but also make sure that these are more aligned with my passions. I have now left Ericsson, mainly because I didn’t do anything to stay, but also because it was the right time to leave…

Those that know me, know that I spent the last four-five years reinventing myself. I will now start my own business. I will focus on innovation as a service, building up a digital innovation factory while at the same time setting up a coaching service for entrepreneurs. I thought it could be worthwhile sharing some of my experiences and learnings from this journey.

So here are a few tips that I would like to share with any of you that is contemplating a career transition or that is maybe thinking about how to make a complete career shift.

It is time to act!

To help you in that process, it is probably good to start asking yourself a few questions. What is the state of your current industry? Think about your industry and where it will be in 5 years, in 10 years… is the outlook gloomy? Then prepare to change….

Is your industry heavily relying on constant introduction of new technologies? Then ask yourself how soon the technology you are working with can become obsolete?

How long are you willing to learn new technologies? As you get older you might get tired of learning deep technical topics. You might also want to ask yourself if the technology you are currently using is portable to other industries.

In my case I have seen the telecommunications industry declining for the last ten years and for many years I was working with VoIP systems. So I found myself in an industry that is in turmoil, but also working with a technology that does not provide much value outside of the telecommunications industry.

Shift technical skills

I had to move out of VoIP, so I decided to move to IoT, which is much more trendy, but also a technology which is in early adoption, so it is a bit more future proof. I also worked with other technologies complementary to IoT, which are Bigdata and Cloud. My recommendation: Don’t stay with technology that is quickly becoming obsolete or that corners you to one industry.

Reassess your industry profile and market value

Having worked 15 years in one industry and one company, it became quickly clear that my value was rapidly declining on the job market. Not only because of the technology gap, but also because my network was primarily based on Ericsson colleagues and customers in the same industry. Not so good when you see how recruitment is done nowadays.

Unless you are fresh graduate, it is almost impossible nowadays to be recruited unless you know the right people. Recruitment is done on recommendations based on circles of trust. At the same time the skills that I had developed were rapidly falling out of popularity. I was planning to move into IoT to fill that gap, but I had also to do something about my network.

Create Your personal Brand

It became clear to me at that point that I had not only to reinvent myself but I had also to create a strong digital personal brand. I wanted to become a thought leader, visible to the industry and accessible across multiple social media channels. Social media quickly became a platform for me to network and increase my visibility. At the beginning I mainly engaged the community by liking articles, retweeting, commenting. But as I grew confident I started to write my own content and spend also a lot of time curating content. I focused mainly around two areas, which are IoT and Innovation, this helped created a strong perception around my brand. I even managed to get ranked 12th position globally by Oanalytica as one of the top 5 influencers in M2M in social media.

Online and offline activation of your brand

Online content will you get noticed, but if you are building a personal branding strategy, it is important to focus both on the online activities as well as the offline activities. Make sure you are also visible to communities in person. This is how you will be able to build a reputation. I did a lot of networking events, whether it is meetups, conferences or others. Any opportunity is good to expand your network and increase visibility. I started to engage more and more of the startup community and IoT community, which gave me opportunities to speak in panel discussions, take seats as a jury member in various contents, and actively mentor and coach entrepreneurs.

Recycling skills

One of the tricky parts, when you are thinking about changing career or changing industry is where to start with that shift! What is it that you can build on? The interesting part is that some of the skills that you have developed can probably be recycled. I noticed for instance that the SPIN sales training that we got at Ericsson gave me a lot of practice with questioning skills… which is a very good starting point if you want to move into coaching! At the same time I found my sales and marketing knowledge also very valuable for startups. I realised that the public speaking training I had attended a couple of years ago, is something I could easily revamp into a startup pitching training. Recycling skills is something you should experiment with as well.

Experimenting

During the last 4 years, I made a large number of experiments on the side of my day job, each of them building up on the previous experiment and helping me to better understand how I want to position myself in the industry and how I want to shape my identity. Now, after 4 years, I can say that this identity is fully aligned with my passions. But to get there I had a number of failures, successes and learnings. I had joined a startup, just to realise that there was not enough team commitment to succeed. I have coached and mentored a number of startups, to learn that the reward is mostly that you can impact people’s life. I have done small experiments on educating entrepreneurs, running innovation and sales workshops at incubators, accelerators and universities. I am regularly writing articles for the innovation and tech magazine, and I had the privilege to join global organisations like AngelHack or the World Summit Awards. These last two organisations ultimately allowed me to connect to amazing people around the world, fearless entrepreneurs, thought leaders and change makers.

During the last 4 years I piloted all the building blocks that I will use in my new business and I have build-up key relationships for my business

I feel now more ready than anytime before, and I hope that these few tips can help a few more people in their career transition. I would like to hear how you approached some of these difficult career transitions. Do you have any other recommendations you would like to share? What worked or didn’t work for you? You can also reach me directly at jls@innoopolis.com