In a previous role, I hired Parker[1], who was pivoting from a successful career as a front-end software engineer to a career as a user researcher. Parker had learned about user research when they left a small bootstrapped startup. They got a Senior Engineer role at a big tech company and started meeting their colleagues in functions that their small startup didn’t have. Feeling the pull of user experience, they started learning about user research in their spare time, reading books and articles, and spending as much time as possible with their new user researcher colleagues. They decided that they wanted to pivot from their successful role as a Senior Engineer, and applied to my Associate Junior Researcher opening.
I was excited to hire Parker. I was working on complex enterprise products whose primary users were system administrators and other technical people. Parker’s engineering work was for another enterprise software company, so they understood our complex domain. They had conducted some of their own usability studies in their previous role, and had built a good foundational knowledge of user experience and research methodology. My team was excited to have them join us.
For junior roles, we’re often not looking for a lot of evidence of professional skills like mentoring, managing conflict, or influencing without authority. Those skills usually come later in someone’s career. For those making a career pivot after a successful professional career in another discipline, this can actually represent a challenge. A career switcher who does have those professional skills can be at a disadvantage if they have a short-sighted manager who doesn’t leverage or even value those skills in someone at their level.
I didn’t fully realize this when I hired Parker, but Parker had lots of strong professional skills like mentoring, managing conflict, and dealing with difficult stakeholders. That helped cement their role as a trusted and valuable member of my team because others saw how effective they were. Since then, I’ve mentored other career switchers who, after 3 or 4 years in their new role, are trying to decide if they should stick it out because they feel like no one cares about anything other than the new technical skills that they have built.
However, once the career switcher gets over the hump of proving their foundational technical skills in their new career, which often comes with getting that first Senior title, they often have an accelerated path. Because they have a much stronger foundation for the professional skills needed to differentiate them at the higher levels, they are now at an advantage compared to their similarly-leveled peers. In this case, Parker quickly built their technical skills and earned a Senior title on a fast track. We have both moved on from that company and continued our career trajectories. We caught up recently, where I learned that Parker has recently been promoted to the Principal level at their current company.
In an ideal world, a company will have a robust career ladder that recognizes both technical and professional skills for all levels of their career ladder, and gives managers tools to appropriately evaluate their skills. When a manager only evaluates and values the technical skills and undervalues professional skills, they reduce the ability of individuals and teams to be more effective and more satisfied in the work that they do. They run the risk of losing a career switcher like Parker who brings more to their role and team than just the new technical skills that they’re building.
[1] To maintain privacy, Parker is a pseudonym.