Job hopping and career development

When changing jobs, changes in industry and position will bring different challenges and opportunities, affecting the difficulty and success rate of job hopping. It is recommended to choose the appropriate job hopping type and path according to personal career planning goals to achieve better career development.

For a student, his career planning route is relatively broad, because he has no label now, he is just a college student, and he has countless choices to make.

For those of us who are considering job-hopping, if you are currently working in a company, then your work experience will give you a label on your resume: you used to work in e-commerce, short videos, user operations, content operations, etc.

When you have more and more labels and they become heavier, your choices will become narrower and narrower when you go for an interview.

Because you have many years of experience in operations analysis, when you are looking for a data analysis job, HR will definitely think that you have no experience in data analysis and it would be better to find someone who has done data analysis.

Therefore, we certainly hope that every time we change jobs, our new job will have a better label, which can make our future job changes smoother.

So when you change jobs, you should not only consider your current situation, but also think about whether the new job will help your long-term career planning in the future.

1. The impact of job hopping on career planning

Job hopping affects career planning in two main ways. The first is the industry. The second is the job position. The industry refers to the industry you are doing and the company you are in. What industry is it in?

For example, e-commerce short videos, o2o, taxi-hailing platforms, etc., these different industries have different business models. At the same time, the issues they care about, the indicators they focus on, and their data structures are all different. So if you cross industries, for example, you used to be in e-commerce, and now you cross industries to do short videos, then a lot of your experience will be wasted, and you will have a lot of new things to learn.

For example, if you analyze short videos and see the completion rate, you have no idea what it means because you have never seen it before, and you don’t know what kind of number is good, and you don’t know what the characteristics of short video users are. If we launch a new function or a new activity, you will not be able to see the short video data or the activity data after you pull it out.

But for an experienced person, when he sees these data, he will compare them in his mind with the data he has done in the past.

So, he will be able to draw some conclusions easily. It's like when an experienced person is doing analysis, he is always doing competitor analysis. If you have no experience, you can't do this. For employers, they will definitely prefer to hire people from the same industry.

Such people do not need further training because they have a lot of background knowledge, and this kind of background knowledge often cannot be acquired through centralized training. They are more likely to be immersed in this environment every day. The second aspect is the job direction. Generally speaking, the larger the factory, the more detailed its job division will be. For smaller companies, such as startups, the division of labor will not be particularly detailed and will be relatively broad.

For a larger company, such as a larger e-commerce company, its data analysis team may be divided into content analysis, user analysis, product analysis, etc. There will be a full-time data analyst for each direction, because the business volume of this large company is large enough to support the recruitment of so many analysts to optimize in each direction.

But for a startup, its company size is relatively small, so what kind of people should it recruit? Generally speaking, it prefers to recruit people with broad skills and who can solve more different problems.

If you want to enter a large company, generally speaking, you have to dig deep in a specific direction and be particularly strong in a certain point; if you develop in the direction of a generalist, knowing a little bit about everything but not being good at any one of them, then the probability of entering a large company will be smaller.

Then you might say, if I don’t want to work in a big company, I just want to be a manager in an existing startup and keep climbing up. Is that possible? In fact, it is also difficult, because for startups, sometimes they would rather go to a big company to recruit someone to be a leader, rather than training internally. So in the end it comes back to the question, even if you want to be a leader, it may be better to go to a big company for a while.

2. Different job-hopping difficulties

Let’s talk about the difficulty of different types of job hopping.

We just mentioned that job hopping will lead to changes in both industry and position, so what about these two types of changes? We will combine them into four types, which are:

1. Same industry, same position.
2. Same industry, different positions;
3. Different industries, same job
4. Different industries, different positions.

1. Same industry and position

Same industry, same position, easy to understand.

You used to work on short videos, and now you have moved to another short video company and are also doing content analysis. The difficulty of this job change is naturally very low. For example, if you move from a certain audio platform to a certain hand, it is easy to get a resume with the same industry and the same job experience. The interview is also relatively simple, because the things you talk about are the same types of problems that the hiring departments are currently facing, so there is no barrier in your communication.

So if the company you are currently working for is very similar to another large company in the same industry, then what you need to do is to package your current project and prepare your resume. Then, you can quietly wait for this large company to release a position that you can match.

2. Same position in different industries

The second is different industries, but the same position.

The good news for data analysts is that data analysis positions are not picky about the industry.

Of course, this principle also applies to other mid- and back-end departments, such as technology, finance, and so on.

This can be said to be a great advantage for data analysts, because no industry can maintain steady growth forever. When an industry reaches its peak, it will begin to decline, and after entering the recession, layoffs will naturally occur.

For those business personnel who are deeply tied to the business, it is difficult for them to change industries. However, for those in the middle and back-end, such as data analysts, it is relatively easy for them to change industries.

3. Different positions in the same industry

The third type is the same industry but different positions.

For example, you used to work in user operations at an e-commerce company, and then you changed jobs to the same e-commerce company, but your direction became product operations. This span is actually larger than the span of different industries, because different businesses

There is actually more to learn in a field than in an industry.

Startups don’t set up such detailed job breakdowns. Those that do are usually found in large companies. So if you are in the same industry but have changed to different positions, generally speaking, the size of your company must have reached a certain level.

When recruiting, such companies would rather hire people with specialized skills.

4. Different industries and different positions

The last type is different industries and different positions.

This kind of job-hopping is very difficult. It will be very difficult to succeed in one go, so you can only do it step by step.

3. How to plan for a job transition to a large company

If the ultimate goal is to enter a large company, how do we design the rhythm and planning of our job hopping?

According to the four types of job hopping mentioned above, the best way for us to enter a large company is definitely to work in the same industry and position.

First of all, your company cannot be too small, because if it is too small, your communication and coordination costs will be completely different from those of large companies. If you have not experienced the communication and collaboration of a large team, large companies may reject you for such a project.

Then, in your position, your work experience and project experience are consistent with the job objectives of this large company.

Of course, this is the most ideal situation. Many times, what we are doing now is very different from the big company you eventually want to go to and the position you want to do. In this case, we have to change jobs based on the principle of giving priority to positions and then the industry.

What does it mean?

Let me give you a few examples. Recently, a classmate of mine consulted me. He is a data product manager in the data middle office department, which is quite far from the business. He is mostly exposed to data analysis of data products, or some relatively general and empty data analysis. In the end,

He had no idea how the business was implemented, so he really wanted to be a data analyst in the business team. At the same time, he also expressed to me his desire to join a large company.

If you want to eventually work as a business data analyst at a large company, your current resume will definitely not be enough, so you can only take it step by step. My suggestion is to change your position first.

First, find a company that can allow you to become a data analyst in the business department. This is the first priority, because the threshold for job switching is higher than the threshold for industry switching.

After finding a suitable position, you should immerse yourself in it for two to three years and gain a certain amount of experience. Then you can consider changing industries. In this way, after two job changes, your industry and position will match the industry and position of the large company you are targeting. In this way, the difficulty of your job search will become lower.

There is another classmate who is a sales assistant of the sales team. To put it bluntly, he is a cousin. He mainly helps the sales team to follow up on sales. Most of his daily work is to make Excel spreadsheets for the sales team, break down the goals and follow up on the progress of the goals.

This position is far from the big companies. Of course, there are sales teams and sales assistants in big companies, but they are not called data analysts. Even in big companies, the salary of this position is not very high, so I think you definitely don't want it.

If you want to go down this path, you must want to be a real data analyst, so the next time you change jobs, try to change your position. Prioritize positions, always remember priority positions, if you have been a sales assistant for too long, this label is too deep, and it will be difficult for you to get out of it later.

IV. Conclusion

After talking so much, what I want to say is that you must not only focus on this job change, but you must look further ahead and think clearly about the impact of this job change on your long-term planning.

Okay, that’s all for today. Bye.

Author: Jason

Source public account: Ternary Variance (ID: 686668)