Expand your mid-career job search

Time for a new job? Don’t feel limited to looking within your current industry—your skills may be more transferable than you think!

Once you’re mid-career, you’ve usually built up a strong foundation of knowledge, skills, and experience within your field. And you’ve probably developed that foundation within a particular industry—the type of business or organization where you work .

So when you start to look for a new opportunity, it makes sense that your first glances might be toward companies in your current industry. After all, that’s where your expertise is, right?

Well, not always. It might be simpler than you think to apply your skills in a new industry. Think about it: if your job is in accounting, IT, human resources, management, design, business development, or a host of other occupations, it’s likely that companies in nearly every industry have similar jobs—and need similar skills and experience. In certain cases, management deliberately hires from outside their industry in order to innovate and grow.

Wondering what industries are most likely to employ your particular occupation? You’re in luck—you can easily find that information with CareerOneStop’s Industry/Occupation Trends reports. You’ll enter your occupation and find a breakdown of which industries commonly employ people in that occupation.

From there, you have lots of options to research industries:

• Create an Industry Profile for your state to learn about projected employment trends, wages, and more. Use this to focus your search on growing industries in your area.
• Learn more about employment outlooks from professional industry associations. These can also be a great source of learning about a new industry, through publications and training events, or for finding contacts who are established in the industry.
• Visit the Employer Locator to find businesses within any industry in your local area. You can target a job search to specific employers by reaching out to their human resources department or to leadership in a division that employs people in your field.

For more ideas on how you might transfer your skills and knowledge to a new job, visit mySkillsmyFuture. You’ll enter your current occupation and find a list of careers that might require similar experience. From there you can explore careers and find employment outlooks, learn about typical education and salaries, and even find current job openings in your local area.