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🕰️ Times have changed, sonny!

When I was an intern at a newspaper, I met an editor whose job was mostly to train new hires like me. At one training session, he told us how he got to where he was. His first job was as a newsroom assistant at a major global news agency, where his role for the first couple of years was to deliver mail to journalists in the newsroom. 

He stayed on and eventually rose through the ranks to become a clerk, and then a correspondent, a role in which he could actually write stories. By the time he left the company after more than 30 years, he was a general manager overseeing the agency’s entire news output from the South Asia region.

But career tracks like this are rare in today’s fast-evolving workplaces, where progression pathways aren’t as linear as they used to be. Many of today’s jobs weren’t around 30 years ago. And it’s possible they won’t be the same in 30 years’ time either. 

In April, LinkedIn conducted a survey of 1,000 workers in Singapore aged 18 and above on their thoughts about non-linear career paths. It found that:

• About 70 per cent planned to pivot into a new career or role with a different job scope within the next two to three years

• About 73 per cent said they think companies are now more comfortable hiring professionals who may not have relevant work experience but have the right skills

📇 Not just a fancy name

The first time I heard of “career pivots”, I thought it was just HR jargon for job hopping. As it turns out, there’s a little more nuance to the term. Whereas job hopping is often associated with changing roles indiscriminately, career pivots involve some planning.

To find out more, I spoke to Pooja Chhabria, a career expert at LinkedIn, who says career pivots are about acquiring new skills as you expose yourself to different jobs. Doing so can put you in a better position for higher-level roles that might not have been accessible to you previously.

“Employers are making the move to skills-based hiring, instead of just solely considering academic qualifications or job experience,” she tells me.

Take, for example, tech worker Erin Huien Lim. She started off in marketing and communication roles at several firms and, after a career break, picked up coding skills. Now, she’s a technical customer success manager at a fintech company, where her background in marketing and communications helps her approach web and software development from a user-centric perspective. 

Pooja herself is another example, having taken up several different roles before her current position as head of editorial for the Asia-Pacific region.

🏛️ Laying the foundation

Remember the planning I talked about earlier? For those looking to undertake a career pivot, here are some tips from Pooja.

Establish your objectives: Set clear goals for your career pivot, including the skills you want to develop, the level of responsibility you want to aspire to, and the impact you want to make. What do you hope to accomplish in your next role? How or when do you want to get there? How does this align with your values and purpose? 

Develop and spotlight your skills: Invest in developing hard skills that are needed to make that career shift, and identify the transferable soft skills that you can apply in your new role. If you’re unsure where to start, LinkedIn has a paid resource. Alternatively, check out the SkillsFuture portal, which routinely puts out what skills are needed for in-demand roles.

Don’t follow the herd: Reaching out to professionals and experts – including those from outside your industry – can help you build connections that could open up opportunities.

That said, just because more of your peers are opting for career pivots, it doesn’t mean you can’t find success with a more traditional, linear career path.

Specialist job roles, such as doctors 👩‍⚕️ and lawyers 🧑‍⚖️, require mastery of technical skills to perform well. Remaining on the same career track can also allow you to develop deep expertise in your field, which can help you become an indispensable subject-matter expert. 

Still, the skills needed to do any job in Singapore are changing so quickly that by 2025, it’s likely that four new skills will be required for any existing job, according to a LinkedIn report. 

So even if you decide to stay in the same role, you’ll need to keep abreast of industry trends and continuously challenge yourself to pick up new skills, or risk falling into irrelevance like some middle-aged workers here have.

TL;DR:

• The majority of workers in Singapore are rejecting the idea of linear career progressions

• Instead, they’re undertaking career pivots to pick up skills they wouldn’t otherwise have

• These pivots aren’t about indiscriminately hopping; they require some planning

• Employers’ hiring practices are now based more on skills rather than experience

• Non-linear paths aren’t for everyone; be mindful of the threat of irrelevance