How to Transition From HR to Another Career

No matter how long you’ve been in one career, there is always time to make a change.

But what happens if you’ve worked in human resources jobs all this time and are now looking for a new career?

HR is an integral function for any business, touching all aspects of operations. Still, many HR professionals need help to adapt to a new department.

This detailed guide will show you the best ways to transition from HR to another career. If you follow these steps, you can adapt to any career change. Here’s what you need to know.

Update Your Resume

Your first step should be to use a service such as https://vacanseat.com/resume-builder to prepare your resume. This is much faster than doing it manually and helps create a resume that’s attractive to recruiters.

Additionally, you want to be in a situation where you can share your resume at a moment’s notice. So, ensure you keep your resume saved on a cloud drive, phone, and laptop. You should be able to quickly email your resume to a recruiter or upload it to a job board from your phone or laptop.

Consider Your Strengths

Now let’s look at an HR professional’s strengths and how to transfer these skills. When deciding on a new career, you want to choose one where you can use the same skills.

One skill you’ll have as an HR professional is conflict management. Other careers that allow these skills include law, brokering, and diplomacy.

Likewise, HR professionals are often extroverted. After all, they must interact with their colleagues daily and often for long periods. This is a perfect skill for any sales job.

Alternatively, you can transfer these skills to marketing or public relations jobs.

Now let’s look deeper into your skills and how to market them and improve them. This will help you narrow your search for a new career.

Communication Skills

As mentioned in the previous section, communication is one of the key skills for an HR professional.

You want to improve your communication skills to increase your chances of a career change.

Communication skills are perfect for almost any type of job.

Consider what communication skills you wish to improve. For example, you could improve your public speaking skills.

You can take public speaking classes. You can also join an organization such as Toastmasters to build these skills.

Public speaking is great for careers such as diplomacy or law.

If you’re not interested in public speaking, then you can work with interpersonal communication.

This is when you’ll communicate with one person or a small group.

This is great for jobs such as interpretation, mediation, or tutoring.

Writing Skills

As an HR professional, you’ve probably had to do a lot of writing during your career.

Whether you’re writing codes of conduct or compliance reports, detailed writing is crucial to your success.

Writing is becoming more of an important skill for various types of careers. You have to decide what type of writing you enjoy the most and how you can use these skills in a new career.

Suppose you enjoy writing compliance reports. You might want to work in legal writing. You can also work as a court reporter.

Otherwise, the sky’s the limit when it comes to writing jobs. You can work as a ghostwriter, blogger, copywriter, press release writer, etc.

You can also work as a proofreader or editor if you’ve got excellent attention to detail. This is a great skill for editing books or AI-generated content.

Find one type of writing skill that you enjoy the most. Work on building this skill and then seek out relevant opportunities.

Diversity Skills

We all know the importance of diversity and inclusion in the modern workplace.

As the world becomes more connected, anyone who understands diversity will have the upper hand.

As an HR professional, now’s the best time to use these unique HR skills.

Try to find a career that requires you to interact with people from diverse backgrounds.

If you’re fluent in multiple languages, then you can become a translator or interpreter.

This will open doors to people from diverse backgrounds and cultures. Other options can involve working with immigrants. This can range from working in immigration law to teaching English to immigrants.

This gives you many opportunities and also is one of the most rewarding careers you’ll find.

How to Transition From HR to Another Career

Once you’ve built your skills, you’re ready to start seeking a career change. The first step is to network with other professionals in the field.

Make sure you add them on LinkedIn and try to meet in person. You can add them to other social media networks with a professional profile.

Attend any networking events or career fairs related to your dream career. Reach out directly to recruiters from any company you wish to work for.

After finding an entry-level job in your new career, you need to start building your reputation.

Start creating content related to your new field. This can range from writing a blog post to starting a YouTube channel.

As your reputation grows, you can start appearing on podcasts, giving talks, and hosting seminars.

This will help you stand out in your new industry. It’ll help you turn your new job into a lifelong career.

Transitioning to a new career is easy, but you want to make the same impact that you’ve made in your HR career.

Start Your New Journey

Now you know how to transition from HR to another career. Maintain an updated resume that mentions the skills you’ve learned while working in HR. Find an industry and career that requires those skills and start networking with professionals at career fairs and online.

Once you’ve landed the job, work to achieve the same success you did in HR. And if you need even more job tips, check out our blog!