Things nobody told you about scaling your Change Management skills

If you’re wanting to make the career change to Change Management or step up in your Change Management career, you might feel overwhelmed and under-qualified if you haven’t worked on major enterprise changes or changes with massive scale. I talk about scale a lot when sharing my Change experience and expertise because I've worked on things that have massive scale, such as global cultural transformations and changes that have impacted over 100,000 people. But if you haven't done these sorts of changes, there are 5 simple ways to reframe your skills to still look eligible and desirable to recruiters and hiring managers:

#1 - Talk about specialisation instead

People usually come to Change Management from a number of different disciplines such as Marketing, Communications, Learning and Development, Human Resources, Project Management, Operations and more. In those roles, you’ll have specific experience in that specialisation (such as a HR Specialist might have experience in rolling out a Human Resource Information System or HRIS). Calibrate on your specialisation as transferable skills to apply into the realm of Change and try to go for projects rolling out those types of changes. What are the skills, experiences, and projects that are most relevant for Change Management? You've done a billion other things,  but take those top 15 and highlight those in your CV and eliminate or bundle into one bullet point the lower level tasks that don’t relate as much to Change Management. 

#2 - Refer to the team not the numbers in the team

If you’ve worked in startups or on smaller teams, you may not have rolled out new processes and ways of working to hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. You might have rolled out training to like five or ten people. In which case, I wouldn’t include those numbers in my CV. Instead, I’d probably roll up to the team. Instead of saying, “I trained 5-10 people”, say “I trained the Sales team”. You aren’t lying, you’re just reframing. Especially because you still needed to develop the same training for 5 people as for 500 people (just the execution and logistics may have been different). The Sales team could be 5 people or 50 people - you don’t need to include this on your CV and only need to detail the number in interview if specifically asked how many people were in the Sales team. It might've been delivered a bit differently. But the training itself would've been the same.

#3 - Know the difference between organisational change and enterprise change

Enterprise change is changes in processes, productivity, operating models etc. It’s one type of change and may be used to talk about changes that aren’t digital or technology changes. But all change is organisational change. So rather than get wrapped up in “enterprise change” experience of actual organisational structure, policies, and processes, calibrate at the general level of organisational change instead.

#4 - Realise that scale doesn’t matter

And scale really doesn't matter. Scale is the same everywhere. You do the same change everywhere. The difference between doing it with 50 people versus doing it with 1,000 is lead times and support, such as making sure that there's champions at each site. Change is a transferable skill. You can take it and you can use it anywhere. You can use it in an organisation that has 10 people. You can use it in an organisation that has 100,000 people. It’s the same skillset. Startups won’t usually need it because they are pivoting constantly day-to-day or week-to-week, but I’ve had consulting clients of 500 people and the change is just as complex as rolling out to 100,000 people.

#5 Go for lower level Change roles

If you’re just moving into Change, you'll probably be going more for junior level roles like Change Analyst or a lower level Change Manager to get your foot in the door then build up to scale over time. For example, one my Leading Successful Change students Julia moved from Learning into a Change Analyst role. She started out on a smaller project, then a bigger one and got a few pay rises. She then moved companies and moved into a Change Manager-level role in just over a year after finishing Leading Successful Change. Like Julia, you might as well be about getting your foot in the door of Change. And then once you've done that you can progress up.

Mapping your transferable skills, optimising your CV, and exploring different creative paths and pathways to change careers is all part of my new first-ever book “Pioneer Your Career Change”. Pioneer Your Career Change is launching in November and to help celebrate the launch I’m running a free virtual Book Club as a bonus for those people who buy the book during Launch Week. There’s a ton of other book launch bonuses, so if you’d like come along to my global virtual Book Club Kick Off Party call on Thursday 14 November, register your free spot here:

CLICK HERE to register for my free Pioneer Your Career Change Book Club and come to the bonus Kick Off Call

Lata xx