How to transition out of retail, hospitality, and transport jobs

So a lot has happened since we last spoke. I’ve delivered 2 LinkedIn workshops, onboarded 8 people for my 1:1 program, hit 1000 newsletter subscribers, and moved apartments (not willingly I must add).

Shameless self promotion aside, the rent situation is totally berserk here. There’s been a $150-200 weekly increase for apartments over the last 2 years. It hurts bad, but still not as much as 7-Eleven doubling the price of their coffee.

Okay, let’s talk about something we can control now.

Today we’ll discuss:

• The most popular and likely career transition for people working in retail, hospitality and transport

• Identifying the skills needed to make that switch

I wanna talk about these 3 sectors because this is where thousands of students work to support their studies.

It’s not a secret that entry level jobs are not entry anymore. Every employer expects you to have some experience even as a recent graduate.

First preference: work-ex in relevant field.

Right after that is any work-ex that proves you’re professionally and culturally competent - one of the reasons why students gain so much from working in retail, hospitality, and transport, obviously apart from the fact that these jobs pay them.

The challenge arises when you’re unable to find a job in your field, and have to continue working in these industries years after graduation.

I’ve spoken to many people who don’t have the right direction on where to take their career, now that the value of their degree has decreased because of how long they’ve been out of uni.

Emsi is a labor market analytics company. They analysed the career switch made by thousands of workers in 3 industries between 2010 and 2020:

• Retail and customer service

• Hospitality and food services

• Transportation and warehousing

They found that out of 10,708 retail workers, over 2000 people stayed in retail. Similarly, ~2000 people moved into sales and management related roles, ~1000 moved into marketing, advertising, and public relations, 300 moved into accounting and finance, and on and on.

They also used a sample of 6,813 hospitality and food service workers, and 3,066 transportation workers to analyse their transition.

Using the data snapshot provided above, you can work out the numbers and check out the most popular transitions.

This is where we knock LinkedIn, but instead of individually analysing job postings, we’ll use a powerful tool that’ll do this lifting for us.

LinkedIn Career Explorer is a gold mine with over 36,000 unique skills measured across 6,000 jobs.

All you gotta do is plug in the role you’re currently in, and it will show you what transitions you can make based on your exisiting skillset.

For example, let’s assume you wanna become a Marketing Manager, and currently you’re working in retail.

One possible pathway here is to first transition into a Marketing Coordinator role because of its 54% similarity of skills with Retail Sales Specialist.

By learning and demonstrating practical experience in “Skills to Build”, you can narrow this gap further.

The next step is to see what skills we’d need to develop for a Marketing Specialist role.

The skills similarity between Marketing Coordinator and Marketing Specialist is very high, 97%, so you should be able to make this transition by getting more experience as a coordinator and doing well in that role.

It is pretty simple for you to create your own roadmap. All you gotta do:

• Go to https://economicgraph.linkedin.com/

• Click on ‘Workforce data and research’

• Scroll down until you see the section 'Discover new career paths’

• Click on ‘Explore careers’

• Scroll all the way down until you see the option to ‘Select your city’

• Now enter your city and current job.

I’d highly recommend that you also find connections on LinkedIn that are working in your target role.

It’s easier to accomplish something when you’re getting guided by people who’ve been there done that.

That’s all for our 4th edition folks!

As you might have guessed, someone has dedicated a lot of time researching and putting this edition together 🙋 

If you liked it, please don’t shy away from letting me know about it.

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