[28] Building a New Career the Slow and Steady Way with Alison Taylor

You can start a new career without knowing everything. Slow and steady may be your best approach, especially if you’re jumping into something new.

 

Uncertainty is often the reason why people get stuck. When the path to get from here to there isn’t crystal clear, many find it a challenge to move forward.

Here’s the thing: it’s almost always impossible to anticipate and plan for everything. And often, we won’t know what we don’t know until we’re knee-deep in something already.

Alison Taylor’s career story is an excellent example of how one can build a new career the slow and gradual way. Without the need to know everything. Learning things and figuring things out along the way.

Alison never planned to be an entrepreneur. In her words, she was a worker bee. She was interested in technology, not management.

But when she and her husband bought a property in a remote location away from the big city of Vancouver and found their weekend life to be more appealing than schlepping back to Vancouver on Mondays, well, something had to give.

The problem was that Alison’s skillset wasn’t suited for the community wherein they were settling. She was a software programmer writing code that controlled machinery. It’s the kind of work that needed her to be in the office next to the machines. Meanwhile, they had moved in to a place where it’s all about fishing and forestry and tourism.

And so the desire to build a new career was born. One that she could do remotely (or from home) and that would still be generally in her technology wheelhouse.

I needed the time to learn what I needed to learn about the technology and the business. —Alison Taylor

In this episode, Alison and I talked about how she built a new career from the ground up—slow and steady—one step at a time. Alison shared how she learned her new skills without going back to school, what helped her the most during the transition, and what she wishes she did differently (which interestingly is the same thing I would change if I had a do-over).

Highlights of Episode 28:

• How Alison transitioned from employed to self-employed
• How she created a name for herself in her new field through word of mouth
• The earlier “mistakes” she’s made that taught her how to market herself differently
• How cultivating this one relationship opened an industry opportunity for her and where she now has developed deep specialization
• The two things that helped her the most during this transition
• The importance of building new relationships with fellow entrepreneurs
• The advice she gives to someone in IT who may be considering using their technical skills to build a business

To learn more about Alison Taylor, visit her sites Digital Dandelion and ArtistClerk.

Mentioned in this episode

Digital Dandelion on Facebook
ArtistClerk on Facebook
Running Lean (Alison’s book recommendation)*

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