365: How to Switch to a Completely Different Career with Dr. Dawn Graham

Pete Mockaitis
Dawn, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Dawn Graham
I’m happy to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one thing I learned about you is that you have a love for Halloween. We’re recording this in early October, so you might land very near Halloween for the airing of this episode. What’s the story behind you and Halloween?

Dawn Graham
Yeah, so it is my favorite holiday. I’m an October baby, so of course, all of my celebrations growing up centered around Halloween theme. I pretty much thought it was pretty normal for everybody to carve pumpkins and watch scary movies and go to haunted houses around their birthday, but apparently it’s kind of just an October thing. But that is why I love Halloween so much.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Can you recall a particular haunted house experience that really stuck with you in terms of the terror?

Dawn Graham
I know we only have 45 minutes here, so I’m going to keep it brief, but I actually for the first time in my life went to the one in Philadelphia, the penitentiary, which is up there with one of the scariest ones.

Last year they did a very cool thing where they had a hex-challenge, where they took six people and they put you in various kinds of escape situations. One person got their hand cuffed and put a hood over his head. We had to kind of help get him to escape. But a number of things like that. That probably was one of the best ones I’ve been to.

Pete Mockaitis
When you said hex, I was like uh-oh, like freaky witchcraft spell stuff, but it was like, oh, this sounds like wholesome team work and building and engagement activities.

Dawn Graham
It was teamwork. One person got buried alive and we had to find something to get her unburied. It was pretty intense, but definitely all safe and no witchcraft at all.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. I love those escape rooms. I’ve done that maybe four times. At least the ones I’ve been to, it seems like they very conscientiously try to subtly make it harder or easier based on how you’re doing with regard to the clock so that you always feel – at least in my experience – like we solved it with just a couple minutes left. How exciting.

Dawn Graham
Exactly, exactly. The hints start pouring in towards those last 10 – 15 minutes. Go to the left. Pick up the book. It’s under the book.

Pete Mockaitis
I know what they’re doing, but I still love it. I do. I want to – that’s my favorite outcome for any game is to win but for it to be close.

Dawn Graham
Yeah, no, I think they’ve got that nailed.

Pete Mockaitis
So tell us a little bit about your role. You are the director of career management at Wharton. What is your role there?

Dawn Graham
I work with the executive MBA population. All of our executive MBAs are employed full time and they come to the program every other Friday/Saturday for two years. They complete the same degree as the full time MBAs, just on a different format.

As the career director for that group, we’re much more of a coaching model. Obviously career management is something that you do for life. What we do is we try and teach students how to manage their career both where they are currently but also to brand themselves and to gain the skills and close the gaps they’re looking to close so that they’re marketable for a lifetime.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Now you’ve kind of captured some of the knowledge that you’ve shared with this population in your book Switchers. What’s the big idea behind the book?

Dawn Graham
The big idea behind the book is that even though a lot of our students here are aiming to stay at their current company for a while, some of them are wanting to make a significant career switch and they are mid-career. They’ve built pretty impressive careers for the last 15 to 20 years and now they want to do something very different.

For this population, what I’ve learned is that even though they’re extremely capable, they’ve done pretty amazing things, the job market, particularly the applicant tracking systems, and the new algorithms and all the different ways that companies are using technology to hire, are actually biased against this population because they’re looking for a match, looking for key words, key titles, key experiences in certain things that a switcher wouldn’t have.

What I realized is that there has to be a way around this bias so that these very qualified individuals can get in front of the hiring managers a different way and be assessed as a candidate.

Pete Mockaitis
That is excellent and I’m sure a breath of fresh air for many people listening like “Yes, I keep sort of getting the kind of format rejection letter associated. It seems like I just don’t have those key word triggers.”

It’s one of the most frustrating things I think when a system, which is – it makes sense. There’s a glut of applicants. You’ve got to have some kind of processes and systems and automation to make it a manageable job for people hiring, but when it’s working against fantastic talent that they’d really be well served to have, then everybody loses. It’s just a darn shame.

Dawn Graham
Yeah, it makes it very difficult for the companies to find all the qualified people out there. It makes it very difficult for people who want to switch to make that happen.

The strategies in the book Switchers are ones that in my opinion are win-win for both the candidates and the hiring managers because when you hire a switcher, typically that person has made a commitment, they’re hungry to do the job, they’re curious, they’re willing to roll their sleeves up and they’re willing to do a lot more in certain cases to prove that they’re worthy of that role.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. I’m just thinking about all the benefits associated with someone who has less experience, that can seem like a liability, but it can also really be an asset in terms of “Oh wow, you think about this in a completely different way than the rest of us. Sometimes it’s annoying to have to catch you up and explain why this makes perfect sense and other times you’re the one who’s coming up with brilliant ideas for that very reason, that you’re coming at it from a completely different place.”

Dawn Graham
Yeah, and I’ll tell you Pete, in today’s job market, what used to be linear careers that tended to stay the same for a number of years, what we’re seeing is companies are looking more and more for people who are able to think critically, are able to influence others across different cultures, across different functions. They’re looking for people who see creative ways and interconnections that other people haven’t seen.

They are looking for individuals who aren’t necessarily going to follow a playbook, which is another reason why I think switchers are so desirable because they are taking their skills and their experience and they’re remolding in a way to apply it to the new market.

Companies can’t keep up with hiring these days because jobs are changing so quickly, so people who have switched jobs frequently and have made progress and landed quick wins in those jobs are actually going to be more employable over time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. Maybe we can open it up as before we get into some of the nitty gritty for what to do is could you tell us a fun tale of a career switcher who made a big change and had a smashing success by doing so?

Dawn Graham
We have a lot of those success stories here. I think in part because people put in the time and recognize that it is up to them, the ball is in their court.

One person that I can speak to that is a perfect example of this is we had somebody who for years had been a lawyer and she wanted to move into human resources, but obviously when you put forward that I’m an attorney, human resources sees that as a complete mismatch.

But what we did is we totally rebranded her resume, her LinkedIn and her pitch. Instead of leading with I’m an attorney who wants to make a change,” it began with the things that she had done in her past that related most closely to HR. She’d done a lot of work with compliance and employer relations.

While that was a smaller part of her job, she put that in the forefront and ended up taking a job internal to her company, which is one of the best ways to make a switch actually is making a functional switch internally in a company where you’ve made relationships, you’ve made progress in getting known, you’ve accomplished in your current role, you have a history of doing well, you have a history of showing up and being reliable.

The company wants you to stay, so they may be more willing to take a chance on you in a new role. That’s what she did. She did that for two years and then eventually moved to a startup in HR, which is essentially where she wanted to land.

We call this a stepping stone switch because she wanted to make a functional and industry switch but she did it in two steps. First she moved into her current organization’s HR role by rebranding herself, did that for two years, and then moved into a very small startup in the tech industry, which was different from where she was working.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s clever. It seems a sensible thing to do, don’t say “Hey, I’m an attorney looking to switch into human resources,” but rather highlight your human resources-y type experience. I guess if you don’t stop to think about it, you would just very likely probably just do what’s natural, which is to tell it like it is. “Yeah, I’m a lawyer looking to do human resources,” but that’s not the optimal path and it makes a lot of sense when you lay it out that way.

Dawn Graham
Yeah, another example of that that is – lays it out very clearly in just that one piece is had an individual who was in pharma and was on the clinical side, very smart, had a PhD, background in pharma, but wanted to move to the corporate side to do strategy. Pharma is one of those industries where you’re on one side or the other.

Leading off with I have a PhD in chemistry and I have the scientific background, actually hindered the switch, but once that was dropped from the story, it became here are the skills I have in the strategic side, the corporate side, so people could see her as somebody with the skills they wanted.

What happened is that once she got into that final pool using that as her starting point, the PhD became a unique selling point that made her even more qualified than the other candidates who didn’t have that.

What I always say Pete is match first, stand out second. What I mean by that is go in with the skills you have that they are most interested in, regardless of the other impressive skills you might have and then once you’re in that final pool, they’re going to ask you, “Well, what makes you different from the other two or three candidates?” and that’s when you come in with your unique background.

Pete Mockaitis
That is well said and it just resonates as true in terms of because at the first stage, it’s like there’s tunnel vision. The blinders are on. It’s like this is what I’m looking for.

Then it’s sort of – it’s almost hard when you’re in the hiring resume reviewing position to really be creative and open-ended and freewheeling and thoughtful in such a way because you just don’t have that luxury when you’re churning through so many potential resumes and applicants.

Versus when you’re in the final stage, it’s sort of like, “Okay, well, these are real human beings. I’ve really got a sense for what I like about them. Now, I’m really starting to sort of imagine working with them,” and that really sort of makes sense that that kind of thinking can work to your advantage at that stage, but not earlier.

Dawn Graham
Yeah, I think a lot of people believe that a hiring manager is going to do that work for them, that they’re going to take their resume and start making inferences, “Well, if you can do this, then maybe you can do this.”

Unfortunately, what we know is that maybe – even if you get through the applicant tracking system, which more than 75% of resumes do not – even if you get to human eyes you’re going to get six to ten seconds. In that six to ten seconds, there’s not a lot of time for somebody to make interpretations or think about how you might fit in the role, so you have to tell them up front and center. They have to see the words that they’re looking to see.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dawn, I love that we’ve already gotten into some really juicy tips and tactics, but I want to kind of rewind a smidge and zoom out to think about first of all, who are the sorts of people who might really benefit from doing some switching? Are there some key indicators or signs that you’d be well served to make a switch in your career?

Dawn Graham
I think a lot of people are recognizing that the ladder they got on initially is maybe going nowhere because of industry changes or robots have come in and taken over or you maybe have learned about careers that didn’t exist when you first started working. I think a lot of people are finding themselves in this space of wanting to do something different.

But I think the book can be helpful for any job seeker because the tips in it make complete sense no matter what type of job change you’re looking to make.

But I mean people who are looking to go from say military to civilian jobs or people looking to go from maybe an academic job to a corporate job or government to corporate or individuals who are in one type of function in corporate and want to do a completely different function, sure, there’s a couple of paths where you need a certain education and a certain license to do, but there’s so many that don’t require those specific steps.

The reason I wrote Switchers is because there really wasn’t a manual to give somebody a road map to make that switch. There’s over 700 books about what do I want to do with my life, but nobody wrote the book about, “now that I figured it out, how do I actually get there?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. All right. We’ve already talked about some of the key parts of the process associated with executing that switch. Could you maybe orient us in terms of broad strokes overview picture, what are sort of the key steps in the process from start to finish if we’re going to get the overview picture?

Dawn Graham
Yeah, I think first you’ve got to determine if a switch is for you. The book talks about the different type of switches that you can make and the difficulty levels. I think each individual has to assess is this right for me in my life.

There’s an assessment in the book that talks about “what does this mean for me?” because I’ve seen people who have said, “I really, really want this,” but then all of the sudden it becomes, “Well, I don’t want to give up my salary,” or “I don’t want to move,” or “I don’t want to have a bad commute,” or “I don’t want to give up being a manger.” You start to throw in all these yes, buts.

You have to think about the fact that maybe a switch isn’t right for you and maybe you are either happier in your job than you realized or you’re too tied to that identity of your career and this isn’t the best time. I think that’s step one, before you do too much in the way of going down that path.

Then I say go all in on Plan A. What I mean by that is you have to develop this target, which in the book I call Plan A. It has to be ridiculously specific. I find that a lot of people know when they’re done with a given career, but they don’t think as hard about what they want to do next.

The second step is really understanding where you want to go, doing your market research, understanding the skills that are important in that area, starting to build connections in that area and assessing where you fit because if you waver at all, if you have what I call a Plan B, you’re obviously not convinced you can do this. If you’re not convinced, you’re not going to convince a hiring manager or your network contact. You have to be all in. The book talks about how you can get there.

Then the next step would be rebranding yourself, like we talked about with the examples earlier. You need to show up as the person they’re expecting because there’s a lot of bias out there. Hiring managers don’t have a lot of time to dig through and make inferences.

Getting a brand that aligns with where you’re going and creating that image on your LinkedIn, on your resume, with your network contacts is so critical because, again, match first, stand out second. The book talks about how you can look at your skills and you can do this.

Then once you do that, then you really need to get – you need to get out there and network. I know that’s a word that people hate. I call it creating ambassadors in the book.

But here’s the thing, a lot of people don’t recognize that they have a huge network already. They might say, “Well, yeah, but nobody works in the companies or the field that I want to go into.” But what I say is that you’re definitely underestimating the second level of contacts. The second level of contacts are the people those people know.

Once you start branching out into those circles, you’re going to be surprised at the network you actually have built. I talk about that. We can get into that more later.

Then obviously the last step is putting everything together and keeping the ball in your court, meaning you drive this process. You build your network. You build your plan for interviewing. You build the process of creating a compensation package that you’re looking for. You kind of have to drive all of that and keep that going.

And it’s hard and it’s frustrating because you’re going to get some no’s. I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say, “Oh everybody’s just going to be falling over, ready to hire you for twice your salary.” This is a tough process. There’s going to be rejection and there’s going to be things that aren’t fair.

The book talks about those things and how to prepare for them and even how to navigate them, but I also think it’s important to let people know that this is a tough process even though there is a roadmap for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly as you’ve sort of laid it out, it’s like oh, this is a lot of stuff. I know it will vary wildly, but could you give us maybe a rough sense in terms of hours on this process, on the hunt, roughly, hey, from X to Y, you might expect is what you’re signing up for when you want to do a switch?

Dawn Graham
Yeah, I think it depends on the industry you’re going, how big the switch is, so are you looking to make an industry switch, a functional switch, are you looking to do both, how the market is in that area? So if you’re looking to go into venture capital, obviously that’s a much, much smaller niche area than some other switches you might be going into.

I think that’s the reason that the first chapter or two in the book talk about doing this assessment and saying “am I ready for this?” because what I don’t want people to do – I’ve seen people, Pete, go back they decide I’m going to make this switch and the first step is “I want to do is go back to school” and they spend two years getting a graduate degree and investing all that time and money.

One person I know did her internship. She went back to school for speech therapy. The internship, which is the very last piece of this tier program, she’s like, “This is not at all what I expected it to be. I don’t want to do this.” Now what?

I’ve seen this happen so many times. It makes sense. People are very, very tied to their identity and what that entails. That might mean a certain income level. That might mean a certain lifestyle. That might mean how you spend your time with your family or in your neighborhood or whatever those things are.

I want people to be very aware of the fact that this could be a great change for your career, but there are other levers that it might pull along the way. If you’re not ready to do that right now, that’s okay, but I don’t want you to get all the way through the book and realize that. I want you to know upfront.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, that’s good. I would love to get – do you have any sort of pro-tips for doing a quick kind of a preview in order to not make that mistake of “Uh-oh, I don’t like this at all?”

Dawn Graham
Yeah. Well, one of the things that I talk about in the book is really trying things on. There’s an assessment and it talks about what are you willing to give up. Are you willing to give up pay? Are you willing to do all these different things? How much time are you willing to spend on it? And those things. There’s that.

But then I see you really have to say how this fits for you. You have to go talk to people who are doing this. You have to go maybe shadow people who are doing this. You have to really look at what it is because if you’re not willing to – I say this in the book a lot – I’m like, if you’re not willing to lose, you’re not ready to switch.

What I mean by that is that with every change, good, bad, or otherwise, there are things that are going to go away, there are things that are going to be added, and then there’s things that are going to stay the same. Most people only think about the great things when they’re changing a job, but if you’re not thinking about those things that may change in a way that you didn’t anticipate, you might be disappointed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great stuff. Now I want to dig into a couple of the components of the steps to hear some of your favorite tips and tricks. You say want to get ridiculously specific and be all in. Could you give us an example of what “ridiculously specific” sounds like and what “all in” sounds like and what “not quite there” sounds like in these two categories?

Dawn Graham
Yeah, so ridiculously specific means you know the geography you want to be in, it means you know the companies you want to be in, the level, the compensation, you know the culture you want to work in, you know the size company, you know the titles that you’re looking at, you know how your brand fits those titles, you start to build out your network in that area.

But it’s very, very targeted so that you can have a brand statement that if you say that to anybody, they’re going to get what you mean or they’re going to be able to give you a piece of data that gets you to where you want to be. In most cases, that’s a company.

If you know the companies you’re targeting, one of the best ways you can get advice is to share those company names with people you know because chances are even if they don’t work there, they have neighbors, friends, family, and former classmates, former colleagues, and they probably know somebody. That’s just one example.

If you’re telling me, “Well, I have to Plan As. I either want to be a consultant in strategy or I want to be in finance,” then you’re not ready because the thing is social capital is very, very important today. I don’t want to spend my social currency on somebody’s who’s not sure.

If you tell me I want to go one of these two paths, if I give you a name of somebody and then you change your mind two months from now, I’ve kind of wasted one of my social currency cards on you, so I’m going to wait until you convince me that you’ve decided which path you want to take.

I kind of equate it to the difference between – if you have somebody come up and they say, “Oh, Pete, I need you to help me find a new apartment. My lease is up.” You say, “Great, I’d be happy to help. What are you looking for?” They say, “Well, one or two bedrooms, one or two bathrooms, not really sure of location, I haven’t really calculated the rent yet, but-“ You’re going to say, “Well, you’re asking me to do all the work for you. I can’t possibly help you unless you give me some specifics.”

You can kind of use that example to say if that’s how you’re going to your contacts, you’re not ready. They can’t help you and worse they may see you as whimsical, so when you are ready, you damage that contact potentially.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well said. Then I want to now dig into the brand development side of things. What are some of your favorite tips there? You mentioned that you have it with the LinkedIn and the resume. What are sort of some of the best practices in terms of modifying those to tell the story you want to?

Dawn Graham
Yes, you’re always building your brand, whether you think you have one or not, you do because the human brain loves to categorize. All the actions you do, the people you associate with, how you show up, are you on time, are you late, what you say, do you roll your eyes, your body language, your emails, your dress, all this stuff. People are building a brand about you and chances are your brand is very much tied to the job you’re in now. You have to shift that.

A lot of people push back on this Pete because they say, “Oh brand. I’m not a brand. I’m a person,” or, “That doesn’t feel genuine to me.” But here’s the deal, you have a brand whether you like it or not. I say why not control what you’re putting out there so that people start seeing you in this new light.

What I encourage people to do is take a look at their entire selves, look into all of their skills, all of their titles, everything they’ve done without qualifying any of it and then start to pick and choose those things that are going to be most interesting to the audience they’re targeting. Of course you have to look at your audience as well.

A very easy example I can say is if you were going to buy a car and you were a young family. The salesperson was saying, “This car can go from 0 to 60 in five seconds. It’s got leather seats. It’s got this great sound system.” As a young family you’d be saying, “This isn’t the car for me.”

However, if that salesperson said, “It has eight airbags and run-flat tires and it has this child-locking safety system,” all of the sudden that car seems appealing to you. The thing is all of those features might be in one vehicle. It’s about what you put out there to your audience.

Knowing your audience and putting those things out there that are going to resonate with them is really what brand is about. It’s not being fake. It’s completely authentic. It’s just choosing what things you’re putting out first and then those other things are still a part of you, but that’s not the part your audience is most interested in.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Once you’re kind of clear on what they’d like to see and what you honestly have to show in those realms, do you have sort of nitty gritty tips when it comes to the actual making or tweaking of the LinkedIn profile and the resume document?

Dawn Graham
What I would say is that as important as the things you put on, are the things you take off. One of the best tips I have in this area are you don’t just layer on these other things because as we talked about in the example, a few minutes ago, if you’re leading with a PhD and you’re looking to move into a corporate job, they’re immediately seeing you as not a fit.

It may be painful to take that off of your resume or your LinkedIn because you worked really hard to earn it and I completely understand that, but if it’s getting in your way versus building a bridge, you need to think about yourself as this new brand.

Again, that could come in later as one of those unique selling points that seals the deal, but that’s one of the things I’d say when you’re looking at your resume and LinkedIn what you take off is just as important as what you put on.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say take off, now I’m thinking okay, you can drop the doctor or the PhD after your name at the top and you can maybe skip the work experience associated with you in the lab or your research that you’re doing, but are you also saying that in the education section, that’s just not there anymore?

Dawn Graham
No, I would not necessarily say that. What I would say is you need to take a look at the whole landscape and you have to kind of circle what is my new audience going to be most interested in. We can do that by looking at job descriptions, you can talk to people in the industry, you can talk to hiring managers in the industry to find out what is most marketable.

Then there are things that you just might want to leave off. Maybe you want to leave it off of your resume, but yet put it on LinkedIn because it’s one of those things that those are nice to have or maybe you just decide that your market is telling you they don’t want to see this PhD or you have five degrees.

That in and of itself, some people say, “Oh, doesn’t that make me look really impressive?” I say, “No, it actually makes you look really confused.” You want to take those off.

Or maybe your titles are very specific to a given industry but don’t really speak publically about what you did. These are marketing documents.

I want to be clear, Pete, I’m not telling anybody to lie or make things up, but what I am telling you to do is think about if you’ve got this really wonky title that’s only recognizable internal to your organization, you might want to change that to manager and then put your title in one of the bullet points so that people understand what you do.

Because there’s this fine line between being completely 100% writing something that is internal to your company but nobody else in the world could possibly understand and modifying it so that you say, “This is really a sales manager. We call it an evangelist in my company. I know that means nothing to the real world, so I put sales manager.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, excellent.  Okay, cool. I’m thinking about when it comes to LinkedIn, any pro-tips when it comes to the headline and how you play that game?

Dawn Graham
Yeah, so remember that people look at LinkedIn on different devices. More often than not people are looking at things on their mobile phone nowadays. Think about everything from that perspective in terms of length of emails and such.

You want to put in your headline something that’s understandable, something that a recruiter or somebody looking for you would be searching on. A lot of people put kind of cute titles like Jedi, things that, but let’s face it, no recruiter’s going there and typing Jedi. They’re-

Pete Mockaitis
I want an SQL Jedi. That’s what I

Dawn Graham
Yeah. There’s a balance between what is somebody actually searching for and what is going to be descriptive about what I’m doing.

One, absolutely modify your headline. You have a number of characters. A lot of people default to their current job, but especially if you’re a switcher, you definitely don’t want that to be the case. You want it to be more aspirational in nature.

Again, you’re not making stuff up, but you might say ‘ideally suited to’ or you might have 10% of your job is what you really want to make 100% of your job. If that’s in your background, that’s fine to put in your headline if you’ve done it. Or maybe it was three jobs ago and you’re like, “Well, that’s not what I do now.” You know what? That’s okay, you have that experience so you can put that front and center because remember that’s what your audience wants to see and you have it.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. I want to get a couple quick tips if you find yourself in the good position of having an interview. Any quick do’s and don’ts?

Dawn Graham
Yes. If you get to the interview stage, I think one of the things you have to remember is that you’ve now earned a seat at the table. I think one of the things that I encourage switchers to do is not psych themselves out because it’s really easy to look at the job description and say “But I don’t have this and I don’t have that. These other candidates-“ forget it. You’ve earned your seat there. You are – you’ve evened the playing field.

The other thing is if you’ve earned your seat at the interview table, chances are they believe you have the basic skills to the do job. If you were referred in, then that goes a long way in showing fit because that’s one of the ways that company’s asset fit that somebody referred you in.

The one thing that people often overlook is what I call the motivation question and preparing for this in a deep way. That question is in some form “Why do you want this job now? What is it that you’re trying to – why do you want to be here? Why do you want this position?”

It’s a very common question that people are asked in all interviews, yet most of the answers are underwhelming. They’re not thought through. “Well, I’m passionate about what your company is doing,” or “Your company has got a great reputation,” or something that’s pretty generic.

I would say this is the make or break question. This is the question where they’re going to hire you or not because this is the question that tells them how hungry you are to do this work. That’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for people who are hungry, who are going to come in and as the job changes, people can adapt to that job as balls come in out of left field, people who can handle those situations.

They’re looking for people who have committed in some way in their background to building a career in this direction. They’re looking for people who understand how this fits into their longer career trajectory and they’re looking for people who are genuine about why they want to be at this company and who have done their research. They need a very specific answer. If you nail that question, that’s where you’re going to seal the deal.

Pete Mockaitis
You mentioned most answers are underwhelming and so I can think of many underwhelming responses, “Well this is – you’re a leader in this industry, which I’m very passionate about. I’ve always had a longstanding interest in this area. It would just be great to be here.” I can think that’s underwhelming. Can you give us a demo of what nailing it sounds like?

Dawn Graham
Yeah. There’s actually just kind of a process in the book about what I call your career story. Your career story is what you’re really going to develop to nail this question. The career story goes through a couple of different aspects of kind of nailing the motivation question.

You want to essentially go through how you’ve committed to the actual job already, meaning that if you’re a switcher, you’ve maybe done an internship or maybe you’ve volunteered or maybe you have taken some classes, gotten a certification. There’s a lot of things that you can do to get that type of experience. You want it to fit into your story as genuine and fit into the long-term career plan and you want to show how your skills nail what they’re doing.

For example, let’s go back to the lawyer from the beginning of the interview who is looking to switch into HR. What she may say is something along the lines of when they ask her “Why do you want to be in this position?”

“Well, I spent the last two years working to help employees develop a compliance program around working from home so that we could reduce the risk that comes from that while also increasing employee engagement. After building this program with the employees input, we increased employee satisfaction by 20% while also reducing the risk of having people work from home.

After doing this what I realized is that my background as an attorney can really fit into the needs of HR as companies are looking to grow and increase employee engagement and reduce risk around retention. Now I’m looking to move into your company, which is a growing start up, where one of the things that you talked about in your mission statement is building a company around the employees.

That’s something that really resonated with me based on the type of work that I’ve been doing. In addition to having the direct experience of working in these types of situations, my background as an attorney will bring an added level of understanding of the compliance in this area.”

Okay, Pete, I just made that up, but you put me on the spot. I’m neither a lawyer nor in HR compliance, but what you can see in that example is that this person used some clear examples of things that she’s done, so she shows a commitment to it. She has put forth some achievements that she had in this area.

She tied it into the company mission that the company is looking to do and she tied it into her own interests, which is a much more compelling answer than “I think it’s really cool that your company is really focused on employees and I want to help with that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yes. I like it’s just sort of un-missable in terms of “Okay, yup, that’s what you’re in to. That’s what you have done. This fits. That’s great.”

You mentioned the mission statement and I did put you on the spot. I think some companies are alive and for real and others they’re less so, but that notion that if you’re connecting your stuff to their stuff, whether it’s – you’ve interviewed three employees and one theme that came through there was this, that would count too, if not the mission statement piece.

Then that really sends the message, you have done your research and you get it. You get us and sort of what we’re about. It just sort of says, “Yes, you are in fact about what we are about. Excellent.”

Dawn Graham
Yeah, and I think the important thing about that is that there’s a concrete example involved. It’s really easy to say, “I’m totally into that,” or, “That resonates with me,” but when you can bring forth a concrete answer that shows your commitment to it, like, “Here’s what I’ve done that aligns with what you’re telling me is important.” That nails it for a company. They’re like, “Okay, yeah. That totally makes sense.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Dawn tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Dawn Graham
Yeah, I think one of the other pieces of Switchers that I worked really hard to make different is adding a lot of psychology to it. As a licensed psychologist, one of the things that I realized early on is that business interactions, particularly the job search is very much about psychology and how humans understand one another and interact.

There’s a number of things in the book that talk about this and understanding things like loss aversion or confirmation bias or reversible decisions and other things like this that help people, again, whether you’re a switcher or not, understand what’s happening on the other side of the desk so that you can be as competitive as any non-switcher in this process.

Because when you understand what the biases are for a hiring manager against hiring somebody who doesn’t have a traditional background, then you have a competitive advantage of putting together a strategy to combat that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dawn Graham
I have to say, I’ll give you one that I find inspiring, but then I want to give you one of my own that I like to say a lot. “You’re always one decision away from a totally different life.” I love that. Very inspiring. Then one of the things I say to my students a lot is “Life is what happens when preparation meets networking.” A little play on Seneca’s standard quote there.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite book?

Dawn Graham
I have many favorite books as I’m sure most of your listeners do. But one of the ones that I’ve read recently that I like a lot is Build Your Dream Network by Kelly Hoey. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like networking or doesn’t see the benefit in it, you need to read this book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, we had Kelly on the show. She’s great.

Dawn Graham
Perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite tool?

Dawn Graham
One of the favorite tools I like and I references this in Switchers a lot is Steve Dalton’s The 2-Hour Job Search. It’s another great book, but specifically the tool he creates in The 2-Hour Job Search pinpoints that part of the job search process that’s very ambiguous and everybody hates. If you are going through a job search process, I completely recommend that book.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s the ambiguous part we all hate?

Dawn Graham
The ambiguous part you all hate is that part in between figuring out what you want to do and you have your resume done and you have all of that done and then getting to the interviews. It’s a very, very small part between having everything ready, set to go and interviewing. That small part.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Cool. How about a favorite habit?

Dawn Graham
Favorite habit, I would say consistently doing one thing every day towards my larger goal.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intrigued now. Is that sort of the idea is you pick one larger goal at a time and then that’s the rule is hey, every day, there’s going to be at least something toward this?

Dawn Graham
I actually have a couple goals I’m working on, but I think making a conscious decision every day to make sure – so for example, one of my goals is to do a TED Talk, so am I doing something every day that creates a situation where I move closer to that in some form or fashion.

Some of it’s indirect, but other things are more direct. I think when you do that, that’s when the bigger things start to happen. One of the things I always tell job seekers is that if you’re not doing something in one small way every day, then chances are you’re not going to get any closer to that goal. We all think it’s going to happen overnight. I wish. If you figure that out Pete, you let me know.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Yeah. What’s cool about that is I imagine that you might have a big old list of things that could conceivably move you closer to that and such that every day it’s not sort of the exact same thing. It might be for a while, like “email three people,” but I imagine there could be dozens of potential activities that could bring you closer to that and you’ve got sort of a running list that you are referring back to when it’s goal progress time.

Dawn Graham
Yeah. I think it also too becomes a habit for other things you want to achieve because at the end of the day, we’ll probably never get to all of our to-do’s on our list, but if you have a goal on your plate, you want to make sure you get to that to-do that day. It can take five seconds, it can take five hours, but you want to make sure that you hit that that day.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Thank you. Dawn, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Dawn Graham
I would say you can find me on Twitter at DrDawnGraham or you can always check out my radio show on SiriusXM channel 132 called Career Talk.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Dawn Graham
I would say that clarity comes through action, so if you’re stuck or you’re feeling like you’re not sure where you want to go next, take action, take any action. It can be unrelated because the brain loves creativity. When the brain does something novel, it unleashes all parts in our thinking that maybe we just didn’t have access to because we were feeling blocked.

Sometimes it can be taking a walk around the park, going to the gym, it could be reading something you don’t normally read, it can be subscribing to a blog, it can be anything. But when you feel stuck, the best thing you can do is get out of your head and do something.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Dawn, this has been a ton of fun. I wish you all the best with your book Switchers and your Sirius radio program and your students and all you’re up to.

Dawn Graham
Thank you so much Pete. I appreciate you having me.