🏎 How to test drive your dream job?
How to understand whether a particular role or industry is what you want and avoid wasting time and efforts?
I made 2 career transitions: from academia to consulting and from consulting to tech. Before making each career move I tested if it worth it and whether I like it!
The testing recipe is easy: find the most straightforward steps and start experimenting ASAP!
1️⃣ Determine how much time you are comfortable spending on a test drive.
A Day? A week? Month? Full-time or part-time? What is the context? I do not really like sports (but I love cakes, and of course, it is a bad combination), but I know that asking myself one question about the minimum time I am ready to exercise. How much time am I ready to exercise today? 30 minutes? Not really. 20? Not really. 15? Sounds good. And 15 minutes activity is better than nothing :) The next rule is about options.
2️⃣ List all possible test-drive options and select the appropriate one.
For example, I am dreaming of 🏎 Ferrari. In that case, the simplest thing is to check out the Ferrari website and watch youtube overview. The next step is to schedule a test drive in the nearest salon. The most resource and emotions intensive is to rent a car for the weekend and drive it on German Autobahn! Job related options below:
3️⃣ Actionable test drive.
It is easier to start with coffee chats with employees (starting from 1 hour), case interviews (1-5 hours), companies events, competitions and hackatons, and conferences (3-72 hours), part-time projects (starting from a week) or an internship (starting from a month).
Let's talk examples!
🆒 Management Consulting test-drive.
I started test drives by solving the first case with a partner (1.5 hours), talking with five consultants (5 hours), and reading one book about consulting by Victor Cheng (consulting interviews bible, 3 hours). Once I realized that I wanted to try more and decided to spend more time: I applied for a BCG event in France (5 days+ 2 days prep). Consulting companies usually arrange special events or conferences, these days companies are hosting marathons/hackatons. Then I went to work part-time (1 month) and after that applied for a full-time job.
🆙 One more example.
My friend landed an internship in the most competitive industry in the valley - a venture fund by initiating an internship. He proposed to VC partners an option to work for 2 months in internship format with limited salary. He decided that he would be comfortable spending a few months on a test drive and show determination to get a job. He successfully landed one!
✅ Better to try once than think a 100 times!
Comment if you like it or have any questions!