Swapping Careers: Consulting or Finance to Business Operations
Having a job in a consulting or finance industry can be an amazing experience. This is especially so if you’re in a well-established company as you can network with a community of like-minded high achievers, gain trust with your varying clients, and learn skill sets that add value to your career. Yet, there may be a small chance that this amazing lifestyle doesn’t provide you the satisfaction that you desire. Perhaps, you yearn for another kind of learning and you finally feel that you are ready to pursue your other interests.
Thankfully, having a career swap may not be as daunting as most people think it is. A shift from the consulting or finance industry to Business Operations may be a good move as they have similarities in the skill sets that you require. This allows you to be able to move from between industries quickly to make a different kind of impact to build a company every day.
Yet, transitioning out of consulting and finance is still not an easy move. This idea may frighten us as we move into something unknown, the environment and experience a growing company can provide you a different form of learning. Looking for bizops near me? Look no further.
What Can You Expect?
If you’re considering stepping forward to make the change in your everyday career, these are some things you can expect from it.
1. More opportunities with fewer structures
Diving into Business Operations will allow you to grow as you will be able to do more than what your job expects of you on paper. Many of your initiatives will not be included in your job description. In Business Operations the environment is less hierarchical and the possibilities are endless. Growing a business allows for much more flexibility than consulting or finance.
2. Uncertainty in a different form
Previously, there’s always the worry or expectation that a new request from your client would come in out of the blue. Now, things work differently. Your progress doesn’t move seamlessly in a straight line. Sometimes, your project may be hit with stalls for several months but the progress may skyrocket once a breakthrough happens.
3. Highly qualified teams
Most of the time, employees in consulting firms work with a variety of different minded people. When you make the change to step into the business operations side of things, you can expect to see most of your colleagues to be highly talented and impressive in terms of what they can bring to the table.
What Skills Will Be Good For This Position?
The business operations function as a decision-support mechanism that provides support with many tasks ranging from optimizing daily options to tackling the most crucial strategic issues. Juniors in the industry have many job scopes simultaneously as a strategic adviser, operator, and analyst. Here, you can have a deeper understanding of what are the skill sets that will help you in being successful in the industry. Perhaps, some of the skills are already inherent in you that can boost your career.
1. Structured Thinking and Prepared For Ambiguity
Your company may have big scale issues that they currently don’t have a solution for. This means that there isn’t much of a structure readily available for you to follow or you may not be given the project scope. However, structured thinking is crucial to the success of business operations. The ability to break down and segregate information to manageable segments of knowledge will help you significantly in your job.
2. Being Adaptable
Fortunately, your experience in the consulting or finance industry has already taught you to learn and adapt quickly. This will be of great use when you’re doing a career swap as things also change fast in the business operations role.
3. Data and Numbers
Business operation roles are much more than just quantitative analytics. But the quaint mindset that you have developed during your consulting or finance days will be one of your core abilities in managing the business now. The key to success is being comfortable with data and numbers.
4. Business Intuition
You’ve likely learned about many of the various industries and organizations in the market through your current experiences thus far. This business intuition that you have gained will also help you as a business operations associate. With a high degree of ownership in your new job, you need to come up with solutions and execute them well. These processes will definitely need some business intuition as there are many important decisions to be made in time to come.
Mindset
You may be physically capable of the opportunities that are available for you, but what’s important is whether you’re willing to close a door to open another. Having a change in mindsets isn’t the easiest of things but one way to ease this process is to tell yourself that there’s one size fits all solution. As you make your career change, it invites a whole multitude of changes to your life as well as you adapt to your new environment.
1. Be Brave to Take Risks
Most of the time, you will need to make quick decisions with limited information. This may bring a lot of frustration due to the high degrees of ambiguity but you need to trust your own work more than ever.
2. “Get Everything Done” Doesn’t Exist
In business operations, your work is endless. This means you need to accept that some tasks remain undone on your to-do list, and prioritization is essential.
3. Don’t Rely On Structure
In a job where there are high degrees of structures, your work only gets limited into narrow scopes and hinders your variance in performance. As such, prepare yourself a safety net for rainy days but be responsible for setting your own pathway.
As you’ve come to the end of the article, think through seriously if you making this career swap will be suitable for you. If you’re uncomfortable with the unknown, you can always give yourself more time staying in consulting or finance. When you’re ready, start considering what kind of team or model you would like in your first business operations job.
