How a "Stepping Stone" Job Can Put You on the Right Path
One of these days, you may look around your work setting and feel like you need a major change of scenery.
If you generally like what you do but don’t like something employer-specific like your boss or your pay, you may just brush up your resume and start to shop it around to new employers. But for many folks, the problem feels bigger: the change they’re hoping for isn’t about finding the same type of job at a new employer, but a giant career shift altogether.
People find themselves in career ruts for many different reasons. Maybe you pursued your current career because someone gave you an “in” to the career field early on. Maybe it promised a large paycheck, or it was related to what you majored in, even if it wasn’t your passion. Whatever the reasons, your priorities change over time, and you may be facing the choice of staying in a job you hate or embarking on a career overhaul that’s time-consuming and potentially expensive. What do you do?
The hard way to make a career change
I hear this dilemma a lot, and what pops into my mind is something I heard a friend’s dad say all the time when we were growing up: “We can do this the hard way, or the easy way. Let’s do it the easy way.”
The hard way, when it comes to career change, is the way most people tend to approach it. Usually, when people think about making a major career change, they immediately think:
I need to go back to school to get a degree or at least a certificate to transition into a new field
I’m going to have to take a major step back in pay
I’ll have to take a role that’s a level or two below my current level
Those are all extremely expensive, time-consuming, potentially soul-swallowing, ways to initiate a career change.
But what if there was a way to iterate your way to your dream job without completely throwing away your previous experience or shelling out thousands of dollars for re-training? It’s called the “stepping stone” job, and it offers a middle ground that helps you keep your value, both to you in terms of salary, and to your employer in terms of expertise, to help you make the transition.
Lest you worry that career changes only happen in rare cases, they’re actually quite common. In fact, one survey found that almost a third of respondents had completely changed fields since their first job out of college.
A Step in the Right Direction
I hear it all the time. “They won’t hire me without experience, but I can’t get experience without the job!” It’s a common Catch-22. Before you enroll in a degree program, take an entry-level position, or accept a pay cut, let’s walk through the transition process and break down the smaller steps.
When changing careers, there’s the hard way—going straight from point A to point C. This approach is not only expensive since you may need to take a pay cut, go part-time, join a precarious venture, or spend tens of thousands for school, but it can actually backfire. You may not even know for sure you like the new career, making it a risky move to jettison your old job in case you find yourself unhappy again and possibly making far less money.
To illustrate this point, take a look at this graphic that has your current career - let’s call it “A” - and your future career, - let’s call it “C” - at the bottom of the triangle.
The direct path contains a lot of expense and risk
Most people get from A to C, if they ever eventually get there, by doing the things I said above: going back to school, trying to get someone to hire them at a lower career level, or taking thousands of dollars off of their hard-won compensation level in order to make a career pivot. Or, in some cases, all of the above.
It’s risky, to boot. I remember one phone call in particular, where a woman looking to hire a coach said she had just spent around $80,000 on a degree (path A to C) and now that she was in the new profession, she realized she had made a very expensive mistake. Not to mention the common experience of coming back out of school with a newly minted degree or certificate, still to find that people won’t hire you without experience in the field.
The direct path from A to C costs a lot of money. And it’s time consuming. The most likely way to know for sure and to get attention from employers is to get some direct experience in the field, which as we said earlier, is a Catch-22.
Except it isn’t, if you look for a point B: A stepping stone job.
I was telling someone about this approach the other day and her response was “This sounds like a life hack.” It is! It comes from many years of watching people unsuccessfully attempt career changes because the work to push from A to C is really, really hard.
Look for a point “B” as a pivot point
It’s common for jobseekers to think that Point A to Point C is the only way to change careers, but there is an easier way. You can go from point A to B: a job where you do some of your current role but in a new way—be it a new industry, a new job in the same industry, a flip from vendor to client-side, or a management role where you oversee some of the old and some of the new functions. Before you do anything drastic, consider trading on your old career to buy you the chance to learn the new one on the job.
When you start thinking of yourself - namely, your career history and potential - as a product in a marketplace, reinvention starts to look very different from the centuries-old education/apprenticeship model most of us were taught as we launched our first careers. Pivoting the same product to a different industry, finding different uses or even users, and re-framing features to speak to a new customer are all common product marketing tactics that you can borrow for your own career.
The skills you already have carry a lot of value in the marketplace, and it would be a bummer to throw that all away. To use a real-life product value example, did you know that bubble wrap was invented as textured wallpaper? While super cool to imagine on your walls, the interior design market wasn’t having it. But in 1959, when IBM introduced the 1401 variable word length computer, the founders pitched bubble wrap as a packaging material for the fragile new technology, and the rest is history. The history of innovation is chock full of similar stories.
Rather than asking yourself how you can learn a new job or field from the ground up and where you can start over at the bottom of the ladder, you’ll need to ask a completely different set of questions:
1. Does your current position exist in a different industry into which you’re looking to move? It may not be called the same thing or involve the same products, services, customers, or business partners, but many core functions remain the same across seemingly unconnected industries. For instance, if you do account management at an agency, that is actually very similar to the customer success function at a tech company.
2. Could you move to a similar company that has a different business model? For example, if you’re on one side of a vendor-customer relationship, could you use your industry knowledge to flip to the other side of the relationship to gain future access to more departments and functions?
3. What about leveraging your relationships to work with your same (former) colleagues who are in a different role or sector, but trust you implicitly? If you’re a known quantity with good relationships, you might be able to get someone to take a chance on you in a new function.
4. Could you look for a role, or volunteer position, or initiative at your company, where you oversee both your current skill along with the new skill simultaneously? If so, you could possibly learn the ins and outs of a new career that way and, from there, transition completely to the new role after a few years.
5. Or, could you take on a board role, a side hustle, a volunteer gig, or a mentoring opportunity that gives you valuable experience in the new arena?
An example of this in practice could be someone in Marketing who’s thinking about a job in Human Resources. Some ways the Marketing person can get exposure to Human Resources in a “B” type position could be:
Moving to a Marketing role at an HRTech company, where they later then move within the company OR later go in-house to an HR team to leverage the HR tech platform as a client
Moving to an Employee Communications or Employment Branding function within a marketing department, where they interact with HR regularly, making connections and planning a move from that role into HR
Taking on a job at a Marketing headhunting agency, where they use their marketing expertise but in a hiring function, and from there, moving to HR
Volunteering for an Employee Resource Group or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion group where they can help set HR policy company-wide
Taking on a volunteer position where volunteer recruitment and engagement can be later parlayed into talent recruitment and engagement
Taking on a job at a smaller company where they run BOTH Marketing and HR (you may think blended jobs like that don’t exist, but they do!)
In particular, if we use this example, a Marketing person might not think they have much to offer in an HR setting. But actually, the “employee experience” that many companies are pouring lots of money into is actually a marketing role, when it comes down to it. Branding, acquisition, retention, engagement: All words that apply equally well to customers and employee experience.
Using this approach, you likely already have experience that’s helpful to the new career, without making a drastic change to your pay or level. While people tend to think they need to meet all of the requirements for a job, many recruiters and coaches employ the 75% rule, which advises jobseekers to apply for a job they want if they meet at least 75% of the requirements. You want to look for roles where you can meet three-quarters of the requirements with your current experience and the remaining 25% would give you experience in your desired career.
Take a Step, Not a Leap
You may worry that this approach may take too long, but if you compare it to the time spent in a graduate degree, you can actually have a much faster transition if you approach your career transition this way. And this way, you’re much more likely to keep your pay and level consistent from one career field to another.
The “stepping stone” approach is one where you go from Point A, to B - which maybe you love, and stay there - or move on to career C - or even D, E, or F. Taking this measured approach will provide you valuable decision-making feedback in your transition, keep your career value high, and raise critical red flags before you step too far away from the relative safety of point A.
Instead of leaping wholeheartedly into the rapid waters of a career that might not be the right one for you, think of making the transition this way: creating a balanced, low-risk, stepping stone approach to cross the divide between you and your dream career.