To think you can’t change career at senior level

[Purplewish]

without a big paycut?

DH is ten years into his career and doing well but no longer wants to continue down his current career path. He feels that it is possible to switch to something else and still get a promotion on the basis of his soft skills (which he is very strong on) rather than technical skills/subject matter expertise (which he is weaker on). He thinks the former are more important at senior levels. I’m not so sure that you can get away without having some technical skills/expertise/previous experience? I also only know two career changers - one did it in a company they had been with for many years (something DH does not have) and the other took on a more junior role. I guess time will tell but as I like to plan ahead and we had planned to upsize next year before the kids start school I would like to have an idea of whether this is even possible.

I mean something in M&A could potentially be a transition path depending on his previous exp (moving more into the commercial decision making of which companies to acquire after a while), not sure how that would transition into comms though.

But in-house strategy wouldn't be exclusively that, it would also be, should we enter this new market, can we grow our business there organically, should we stop offering this service line, do we want to take external investment to expand, etc etc. If they decide to go for M&A they might do it within that team or pass to the corp dev team if it exists.

It's not a particularly public-facing team though.

Consulting partners are more salesy. Their job is essentially to sell more cases to their clients. A lot of the people I know in corp strategy quit consulting because they didn't like the salesy part. But your husband might enjoy it.

Thanks. That’s really helpful and seems like a promising option.

The public facing/social media/brand side of things isn’t a must-have but he is good at building a high profile and networking. It’s probably useful for the more salesy roles.m but whilst he has been successful at BD he thinks a purely BD role might be quite stressful and wants to avoid it if he can.

Why isn't he doing his own research?