Blog

Sometimes you don’t just want a new job, you want a radical career change. Perhaps you’ve been in finance and now want to be an acupuncturist, you’re a marketer eager to lead a startup, or you’re an educator looking to shift into catering and event planning.

In these situations, it’s going to take more than listening to a few webinars to build the knowledge or experience you need get to where you want to go. You must set aside a significant amount of time for self-directed learning, formal training, or even a second job to gain the skills for the big leap.

This is not easy, but it is possible.

In my experience as a time management coach, I’ve found these strategies to be the most effective for consistently making time for acquiring brand-new career skills.

Accept the Time Commitment

At the onset, it’s important to recognize that between taking care of your personal life, your main job, and this specific skill-building work, you likely won’t have time for much else. For a major career change to work, you need to be willing to cut back in other areas. That may look like limiting optional items like keeping up on your favorite TV shows, going to happy hours and concerts, and volunteering. And at times, you may need to scale back on essential activities. For example, maybe you can still go for runs, but training for a marathon is out of the picture. Perhaps you can still get an acceptable amount of sleep at night throughout the week, but sleeping in on the weekends is no longer in the cards. Or maybe you make sure to have quality time with your family every day, but need to go to class or work on learning once the kids are in bed.

I don’t recommend that you sacrifice your health or most important relationships to make this change work. But you do need to commit a significant amount of time if you plan to leave your current career.

Pick Your Focus

If you’ve decided you really are serious about making a huge career shift and you’ve set aside the time, you need to then research what’s required for your new field. That could be an education program that sets you up for formal licensing or certification, or it could be more independent learning or side hustle work.

Before you put in a lot of time, make sure you know where that time counts. If you must do a formal program to legally practice in your new profession, put your extra time into the prerequisite courses and applications and then, once you’re accepted, the required coursework. Don’t spend lots of time on self-directed learning where you’re not getting credit for what you’re doing. The opposite is true if a formal program isn’t necessary. You might be significantly delaying your success by going back to school, when you could be taking advantage of other ways to acquire skills and gain experience already at your fingertips.

Layer in Learning

One of the best ways to find time for independent learning is by layering it onto activities that you’re already doing throughout your day. For example, if you need to listen to course material, do that while walking or driving to work. If you need to read, do it during a commute if you take public transportation or use an app on your phone that will read the text to you while you’re walking or driving. (Using voice reading apps, such as Talk and Text to Speech!, is the primary way that I get through long pdfs.)

If you tend to revert to reading or watching things on your phone during downtimes, like when you’re waiting at a doctor’s office or during a child’s soccer practice, use that time to work through your learning material instead. Every little bit counts towards the career change you desire.

Continue reading on Harvard Business Review how to designate time and modify your current work schedule to make this goal a reality.

About Real Life E

Elizabeth Grace Saunders is a time management coach and best-selling author who empowers individuals who feel guilty, overwhelmed and frustrated to feel peaceful, confident and accomplished. She helps people struggling with new levels of responsibility after receiving a promotion or becoming a parent, who aren’t meeting expectations at work, or who need better work-life balance to overcome burnout.

Elizabeth was named one of the World’s Top 30 Time Management Professionals by Global Gurus and is a member of Forbes Coaches Council. McGraw Hill published her first book The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment: How to Achieve More Success with Less Stress. Harvard Business Review published her second book How to Invest Your Time Like Money. And FaithWords published her third book Divine Time Management. Elizabeth regularly writes time management articles for Harvard Business Review and Fast Company and has appeared on CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox.