Today I’ve had an enquiry from an assistant director in PR.She says

I’m currently a PR Account Director working for a medium sized agency in XXXX. I’ve been working in PR for 7 years when I started a graduate trainee scheme straight from university. I’ve always been relatively happy in my job until about a year ago when I started to crave a change and to wonder if PR is really for me! Having reached AD level I’m just not sure that I want to progress any further and the things I like about the job are actually not specific to PR, and the things I don’t, are.

The trouble is that I’m just not sure what jobs are out there and what I’d be qualified for. Though I’d be happy to take a step down in terms of level and a slight salary cut, I now have commitments (mortgage etc) which means that I really couldn’t take a massive cut in wage. In short, I feel slightly stuck in PR!

MY REPLY

It sounds like you are in your late 20s and a lot of my clients come to see me around this age – they have become successful in the career path they have followed since leaving university but have reached the point when they are not sure if it is the right one for them any more. 

Alongside an interest in finding out what is the right path for the person they are now, there is also the risk that whatever is best fit may mean a significant drop in salary, although not always so. You are not a new graduate and would enter a new career from a position of strengths, skills and experience gained over the last 7 years. One of my clients last year moved from working in the city to train as a teacher, but we are both confident that she will fast track to head teacher with her financial and business background. 

What interests a lot of people about my programmes (and obviously the Gold Programme is far more detailed) is that it helps them to understand more about who they are and then they can use this information to make the right change for them, given all of their circumstances.

For example, use the info to tweak their job, look for an internal transfer or build a path to a new job. It can be good to know that, for example, you should be doing a more artistic job and if you are an accountant you could move to being an accountant for an arts based organisation, or for yourself with a background in PR we could look at the sort of companies that would best suit what comes out of the work we do, so there could be an interim move on the path to a different career path.

Of course this isn’t always necessary and I have had clients move from – for example, Head of Purchasing in a large company to an academic post at University or another moving from being a Vet to marketing and plenty of lawyers moving to different jobs from recruitment to owning a nail bar.