Long before she panicked, she should have been test-marketing alternative strategies to see which offered her the best ROI (Return On Investment.)

I asked her what she has been doing in her spare time. She admitted that she loves travel and gardening. Has won 5 awards for gardening. Would love a marketing job in travel or gardening but has no paid experience in either.

Here are strategies she is now exploring in order to create more options for herself:

• Create kick-ass “whitepapers” to demonstrate her marketing knowledge in depth in formats that will additionally showcase her award-winning publication design abilities.  Find ways to circulate them to hiring managers including those she has already met.
• Produce B2B or B2C publications on gardening or travel to be used to demonstrate that, although she has never been paid by those industries, she has lots to offer.
• She is going to quietly shadow a salesperson selling to resorts to learn more about VOC (Voice of the Customer) for the hospitality industry.

If what you have been doing is not working, have you considered something new?

(a) http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/16/news/economy/unemployed_need_not_apply/index.htm

On a simple level, a “Portfolio Career” means someone earns income from more than one simultaneous employer by choice or necessity. It is not a new concept. “Freelancers” in ad agencies and “Contractors” in IT have been doing it since the 1970’s as a means of gaining exposure to a wide variety of clients/technologies as quickly as possible. Folks with multiple jobs are easy to find in any industry in Europe.

Deliberately selecting unrelated simultaneous jobs spreads your risk if any one industry or skill area shrinks. Remember when the telecom industry shrunk by 70% in the 1990’s? Ad agency work has been shifting over 20 years from mass media like network TV and magazines to the Internet and other personal media. A Portfolio Career would protect you in similar transitions.

Consider implementing a modified form of a Portfolio Career for yourself immediately without leaving your full-time job. Take a part-time or short-term apprentice role in a very different professional arena – which you can execute evenings or weekends. Take on an 80-hour project to help someone you know with a market research study or engineering proof of concept test. Then look for more complementary projects to increase your depth of knowledge.

I have a client who has created an incremental income of $150K per year from the hobby of creating iPhone apps on Saturday afternoons in front of baseball and footballs games on TV. Another client consults with start-ups evenings to validate new product development concepts. Either person could escalate the new credentials to a full-time income stream overnight if necessary.

Or think retirement and avocation versus vocation. Maybe you have dreamt of retiring to run a bread and breakfast. The part-time apprenticeship you should choose now is as a hotel manager. If the title Director of a non-profit appeals, start volunteering in your off-hours now in an executive capacity – but let them know you will not be available for free indefinitely.

If you are over the age of 45 where the risk of not being able to re-enter your present industry if laid-off  is great, it is absolutely critical for you to be creating options for yourself.

Take charge of your destiny!

Do you have an unusual part-time idea to share with others?

I had a client who was a Customer Service Manager in a hospital. His job was to call patients after they had just had some test and tell them that, yup, a problem had been found and a visit with a doctor for follow-up needed to be scheduled ASAP. Since he was frequently calling people with very bad news, he was not sleeping well and asked me how he could find a job in a new industry given that he had been in the hospital role for the last 20 years.

I helped him see that his gifts included not only his knowledge of medical conditions, but his ability to “deliver bad news gracefully” and help people make thoughtful, well informed decisions when under a huge amount of stress. Together we identified a list of industries where those skills would make him a strong applicant. For example, in the mortgage, insurance and student loan industries he could counsel applicants who did not get the desired funds on other options. By demonstrating in his resume and interviews that the problems he had solved in the hospital world were, on the average, far more devastating and life-threatening than the customer problems in the financial industries, he was able to successfully sell himself as a Manager/Trainer who could handle the most awkward financial discussions with customers very effectively. He was hired over several candidates with financial industry backgrounds.

So if you are looking to change industries, focus your conversation and case histories on the processes and soft skills common to both industries. Secondly, target companies where the skills you own are most critical to business success. For instance, if you are a turn-around specialist, first target the companies in the new industry most in need of a turn-around.

Can you share other examples of how folks successfully changed industries?