I had a career change and didn’t know how

Here’s what I discovered

In my last post on Stealth Skilling, I discussed how I developed skills while in one job that led to me landing another job in a different sector and discipline. I moved from being a university staff advisor to developing concepts and blueprints for skills discovery platforms.

So what were the steps that took me there?

Surprise!

At the time I couldn’t really tell you. The transition to a new career path felt somewhat surprising. Unseen forces seemed to be moving me in directions I wasn’t in control of, though I was excited and intrigued by where they might take me. 

Eventually, however, as technology and industries moved on, I found identifying new jobs I would enjoy more difficult. 

It became clear that I would need to take control of the process to see what new paths I could open up.

Stealth skilling

What I learned is that the ‘unseen forces’ that had moved me into the new sector and discipline were skills I had gained that I had not fully appreciated or articulated. I think of the process of gaining these skills as stealth skilling.

While I was aware that I’d been learning on the job and through unpaid contribution to open communities, and that I could talk about the experiences and outputs from my learning, I found that not reevaluating my skills raised some practical issues: 

1. How could I expect prospective employers to know what I was capable of if I hadn’t articulated all of my skills?

2. How could I discover new occupations I might enjoy if I couldn’t map the new skills I’d gained to job descriptions?

I decided to analyse what I’d gone through so I could make conscious decisions about where to go next.

Job contrasts

First of all, here’s an overview of the differences between the jobs I moved from and to. (I’ve labelled the first one Job Group 1 as this refers to a number of similar jobs. Job 2 is the first job in a different sphere.)

Threads

While there were differences between both jobs, there were common threads spanning them. These included the following knowledge and skills:

• Learning and assessment

• Online technologies

• Technologies for learning and assessment

• Effective practice for learning and assessing online

• Open source technologies and open practices

Skills and stealth skilling

Here are examples of the overt skills required for both jobs and the stealth skilling that occurred from doing them.

The ‘stealth skills’ were developed through the process of doing the paid and unpaid work related to Job Group 1, and were further honed through my work on Job 2.

I’ll break down how these skills were developed and get more granular on what went into them in future posts.

What’s your skills story?

Do you have a story about skills you’ve developed through jobs that you didn’t think of or describe as skills at the time?