Page 116 - Marky Stein - Fearless Career Change_ The Fast Track to Success in a New Field (2004)

Fearless Career Change

From Customer Service Representative to Film
Production Assistant in One Day Using On-the-Job
Training

Name: Scott
Former occupation: Insurance company customer service
representative
New occupation: Film production assistant (explained below)
Primary strategy: On-the-job training
Other strategies: Just Dive In!
Length of time from career decision to a paid position: One day
Cost (if any) of transition: $0.00

Scott was one of my students in a two-day career transition
seminar in Northern California. He was working as a customer ser-
vice representative for a prominent health insurance organization.
Scott was laid off from his job there due to massive downsizing
because of budget cuts in the company.
Scott told me at the beginning of the workshop that he would
like to do “just about anything” other than work in customer ser-
vice for his next career. “The customers are rude. I have to meet a
daily, weekly, and monthly quota, and I’m just not cut out for this
kind of work.”
In the seminar, Scott had the opportunity to examine just what
kind of work he was cut out for. He had just “fallen into” working in
the insurance industry to pay the bills while he finished college.
After he graduated, he just stayed in a groove (or perhaps, as he
might later characterize it, a rut). He had been working for the
insurance company for three years. The pay was good. The commute
was short, and he was a friendly sort who enjoyed his coworkers.
His authentic calling was not at all far from the surface. He
had majored in art in college with the hopes of breaking into the
film industry as an art director, but he had been sidetracked in the
process by the illusive security of his customer service position.
If he wanted to break into the film industry at this point, he
could utilize transferable skills like aptitude for color and design
and for working with paint, clay, and other media to help ease his
way into a lower-rung position and then work his way up to a
department head.

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