March 3, 2025
After 19 years and 364 days (yes, really!) the door slammed shut on my career in hospitality. Not that I ever saw it ending, but if it did, I envisaged it happening a little differently to a pandemic induced push out: a leaving party at the local Indian restaurant, followed by far too many drinks, ending up in a bar where I would relive the heady days of my 20’s; a few kind words from the GM, a guard of honour as I left for the last time (maybe not…), replete with armfuls of gifts, a tear in my eye and a lifetime of memories.
I was left thinking, what now….?
Circa 1992, and at around the same age, I remember my Dad being made redundant and remarking “who would want to employ me at my age”. Now, perception of age is a blog for another day, although, by 40, my mum had definitely switched from Radio 1 to Radio 2 and was spending more time in garden centres than I am (see my blog on what I got up to a 43, as a comparison: https://tinyurl.com/3dzh3hbj); however, with zero positions available within hospitality and my only experience being within hotels, two failed teenage jobs aside, my concern was more “who would want this one-trick pony”.
Fast forward 15 months and there I was, standing in a hotel, armed with a cake, presents and teary-eyed well-wishers (although sadly, no curry, beers, or guard of honour 🙁), having taken the plunge in a new industry, adapted, learned on the job, overcome challenges, tried, failed, tried again and succeeded. There was definitely a beautiful symmetry here, as my last shift in the fundraising department at my children’s hospice charity was spent heading up a highly successful inaugural business expo, one which was initially met with some scepticism by the charity, being untried previously. Fittingly (of course, because that’s all I know…😉) the venue: a hotel! Let’s park the image of that joyous final fling here for a moment, we’ll return later….
Whilst previous generations often enjoyed a “job for life”: following parents into the same industry, raising through the ranks and retiring, the chances are, if you’re employed in 2025, you’ll change jobs multiple times. A quick Google AI search revealing that the average person will change jobs twelve times, but here’s the interesting thing: the average person is predicted, in the future, to change CAREERS, 5-7 times.
No doubt many people, like me, experienced an enforced career pivot around the pandemic, but statistics show that this is likely to continue. For the moment, we can only guess at how the rapid progression of AI will impact each and every job, making some redundant and changing the skills required for others; however, putting this aside, we live in a world of sensational pace, relentlessly driven to achieve profit and satisfy shareholders – mergers, acquisitions, office relocations and delayering; remote working for all in our company, no, wait, back to the office five days a week, actually, hybrid suits us: change, change, change!
Whilst I do not profess to be the master of career change (although I have now stacked up three career changes), the chances are that, at some point, through your own choice or someone else’s, it will happen to you; therefore, it makes sense to get ahead of the game.
Let’s have a look at how I managed to muddle through the process of optimising my own career changes:
Cultural Confusion – A few drinks in the garden, what could possibly go wrong…..
Event sales in a hotel is all about volume, with a sprinkling of revenue management and some operational know how: give the operations team a few minutes at least to turn around a boardroom for twenty people to a theatre style for three hundred; but, in essence, that’s it. So, when I was approached to help a bereaved family plan a memorial walk in my new career as charity fundraiser, I thought nothing of granting permission for the twenty weary walkers to house the walk’s finale fittingly in the beautiful hospice garden with a few cups of ten and cheese and pickle sandwiches.
Except, I had not quite thought this plan through………
Looking out onto this leafy verdant splendour, were the residential bedrooms, housed by families of children with life limiting illnesses, some of whom were heartbreakingly in end-of-life care and, I’m guessing, would not appreciate the disturbance of twenty people who, although had experienced similar, may be celebrating the end of the walk in convivial style.
Cue frantic calls, escalation to my superior, and then my superior’s superior and so on, followed by me hastily arranging an alternative venue to support the end of the walk, complete with team of staff managing the flow of traffic to ensure the walkers negotiated a bridge without pedestrian walkway safely – you can imagine the risk assessment there!
So, what did I do wrong here? Apart from the obvious! What I had failed to realise was that this was not a hotel, where filling space is all that matters, but a haven of support for local families, where reputation is of paramount importance, even more so than in the review obsessed corporate world, where even the slightest risk is deemed too much. On reflection, I had totally misjudged the organisational culture.
One of the most valuable things you can do when changing profession is spend the first few weeks watching, observing and fitting in. Don’t assume that the organisational DNA, the “way they do things”, is identical to your previous rodeos. Take chain of command for instance – is it the norm to only communicate professionally with your direct line manager, or is it the kind of company where things are a little more liberal? Is it the “done thing” to quickly call someone on Teams if you need help? Or do people tend to schedule time in their managers diary? Do people grab a selfish brew or are you expected to pull your weight on the mid-morning coffee run (if it’s the latter, good luck remembering that Janice likes hers weak and Ahmed only has half a cup… let alone whose is the Spongebob mug!)
Be the person who says Yes!
If I could live with myself for being so cheesy (and I absolutely can 😉): Be a tap, not a drain! I’ve come into organisations before where it is the end of an era. A few people have left, and the ones remaining have one foot out of the door. For whatever reason bad attitudes abound, general work ethic has wandered off and team meetings are tumbleweed time.
What a fertile landscape for the new starter to lead a revolution! Just as bad attitudes rot an organisation from the inside out, positive attitudes turn naysayers into…….. well, yay-sayers! Be the curious questioner of archaic processes clung tightly to by the old guard, the fresh pair of eyes, and legs – the office energy! When disaster strikes, lead the comeback; with success, lead the cheers! Just a word of warning, do this too soon, before you’ve learned the lay of the land and soaked in the culture, and you’ll risk positioning yourself as the “office suck up” – making everyone else look bad with your relentless positivity, not a short cut to popularity. On the other hand, maybe you’ll end up pushing a few Negative Nigel’s out of the door a little quicker…
Positioning Yourself
Talking about positioning yourself, here you have total autonomy, because you can choose how you position yourself: in terms of attitude – you can choose to join in the office gossip. But be prepared that, if you are new, you don’t know who to trust and may find yourself out of favour very quickly. You could choose to skip work social events – because let’s face it, what is this fresh hell! You have just about mastered how to get along with Kenneth in Accounts on a professional level and now you’re faced with the prospect of him regaling you with tales of his divorce, dancing on the bar in his spotty yellow and pink boxers, or worse. Go home Ken! But miss these events, at least initially, and you’ll miss a chance to integrate, discover a little more about the human behind the corporate mask and show people who you are too.
In the third sector, I quickly found that here was, to some extent, a lack of commercial nous, that, yes, their raison d’etre is to care for ill children; however, to do that, they need money coming in! Commercial acumen is something that I possess to some degree, and I quickly learned that the Fundraising Manager was absolutely on board with some of my (sometimes crazy) fundraising ideas! So, my “gap in the market” inspired idea for a corporate expo was given the thumbs up, after much tentatively, and proved to be a success (plus provided a fitting hurrah on my last day!). During my time there, I launched a gingerbread version of the hospice’s mascot, sold by a local bakery with a donation to the charity for each biscuit sold, and countless new partnerships, using skills refined in the blast furnace of the cutthroat corporate world, translated into a completely different industry.
What I did here was look at my skill set and match it against what my new organisation was lacking and decide where I could add value, where others couldn’t. Do this and you will quickly become the “go to” person in that particular field. This could involve you having up upskill if you don’t have a particular skill-set – upskilling in Microsoft Excel, for instance, as your company lacks someone with that analytical capacity. Adding appropriate value is the key here: if you’re a sheep shearer, learning dentistry in your spare time, this might not be the most effective use of your time, unless your sheep have bad teeth…..
And remember, it always helps to zoom out a little to gain some perspective: whatever age you are embarking on a new career, remember, it’s just life – if it all goes horribly wrong, you can always try again. Maybe as a sheep shearing dentist…