Career plan | Tribute to the atypical career path

By choice or by necessity, you have had a wide variety of jobs in different sectors. We could describe your career as atypical. Justifying these many changes during a job interview can quickly become a headache. Still, you might derive pride and benefit from having walked a tortuous path.

You have browsed from one environment to another in your professional sphere. You have worked in the field of communications, then education, passing through a job in the field of tourism. Or, you have been looking for yourself professionally for several years, you have chained different jobs while looking for your place on the job market.

If your path is filled with forks, perhaps you feel some discomfort when it comes to presenting your career path. The difficulty in explaining one’s career is often due to a fear of lacking consistency or being labeled as having a lack of professional stability.

Consistency in the atypical

However, in general, a framework often emerges in a journey, even an atypical one. By revisiting your choices, you may realize that common elements have guided you. Some consistency might be found in aspects of your business decisions.

Look back over your journey to find the common threads. For example, curious, you may have had a need to be in a context of constant learning or have sought the possibility of carrying out technical tasks. Or more manual, you may have held a series of jobs that led you to be physically active. You could also have bet on professional choices that mainly allowed you to carry out personal projects.

The hidden purpose could also be simply self-knowledge: your journey has allowed you to discover many sides of yourself. Through your experiences, you have been brought to know your personality, to test new skills, to specify your needs at work.

Your acquired skills

Becoming aware of your strengths in order to take pride in your profile is not necessarily an easy thing to do. Although the range of your knowledge and skills is wide, there are some common skills in the atypical occupational profile.

Your achievements and your learning go well beyond technical elements. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that your journey has taken you to learn a multitude of varied skills, you’ve had to adapt to several work teams, you’ve worked in contexts with different corporate cultures and you’re rich of this diversity.

Your journey is characterized by change. You have therefore very possibly developed a strong adaptation, a capacity for observation, a speed of learning. Also, during your career you have had the courage to seize new opportunities. You have bounced back more than once and taken the risk of trying new things. These skills, although frequently underestimated, are often required in the job market.

Flexibility is the new stability

In this changing world, flexibility and the ability to seize new opportunities are now the new job stability for many workers. The labor market evolves, changes, you will have to adapt, to continue to learn. Your adaptability is a powerful ally for the rest of your professional career.

If you feel you have the skills for a job, it is possible to build bridges between your journey and your next destination. However, during your job search, you may come up against more frequent misunderstandings: hence the importance of preparing yourself properly. The more comfortable you are with your background, the easier it will be for you to highlight the advantages that your profile represents.

To help you, remember that the choices you made are contextual and made according to criteria that belonged to a specific period of your life. Indulgence in your background is key to feeling comfortable outlining your choices.