Alumni careers advice: Tackling career transitions

01 March 2018

Alumni Careers Manager Caroline Egan offers some guidance on the best ways to deal with career transitions.

Whether you are looking to change your career, or take it in a new direction, tackling the transition can sometimes be daunting. Our free online careers management course, available to WBS alumni, now has a module dedicated to career transitions.

Here’s a taster of how the module can support you:

How to make career change happen

Interactive exercises and engaging videos get you thinking deeply about yourself and what you want from your future career; you’ll be encouraged to reflect on exactly what it is that you want to change; to assess your personality, skills, strengths and preferences; and to investigate which careers might be the best fit for your strengths and values. You can also watch videos to learn from the experiences of other career changers and learn how to put what you’ve learned into practice.

Dealing positively with redundancy

In this section, we help you consider your next steps after redundancy, including how to market yourself for new opportunities. We look at the effects of compulsory redundancy, and how to turn a challenging life event into an opportunity to improve your future career. We then take you through the practical steps you’ll need to follow to take control of and proactively manage your career, and how to sell yourself to employers after redundancy.

Managing gaps on your CV

Watch videos advising on managing the gap, and a coaching session involving a recent MBA graduate who’s experienced both redundancy and taken a career break: we cover how to address these issues, and present them in the most positive way possible; how to define yourself in your job search; how to keep your skills fresh and build on them; making use of voluntary, part-time and freelance consultancy opportunities to build your CV; and how making efforts to extend and build your network will pay off.

Returning to work

You may be considering returning to the workplace after taking time out to do an MBA, raising a family, or a period of travelling. Or perhaps you have been self-employed or an entrepreneur for a while and want to break back in to the corporate world? This section covers ways to rebuild your confidence before applying for jobs, which strategies tend to work best when seeking to return to work, and how to market yourself to potential employers.

Career issues around relocation

Relocation can also be a major component of a career transition and require you to proactively manage this. In this part of the module we reflect on the career and employment issues surrounding relocation, including where your employer has asked you to relocate within country or overseas, as well as your own desire to seek a job with a new employer in a different country. It’s increasingly the case that people do have to relocate for jobs and we examine some of the many factors you may need to consider when taking such decisions, how to weigh up all your options and gain other perspectives when having to make these sorts of choices.

Whatever your personal circumstances the Career Transitions module will enable you to be better informed about the choices and decisions you face going forward.

Login to my.wbs to find out more, or contact the team at alumnicareers@wbs.ac.uk