Hi Tania! Your ops/strategy background is relevant for impact organizations—many of the challenges you’re describing (sectoral gaps, positioning transferable skills) are covered in our recent post “Challenges from Career Transitions”.
Your leadership and user-centered design experience could be valuable in impact orgs, though the transition often requires deep networking and strategic upskilling alongside applications—all with a ‘winning or learning’ mindset.
I went through a similar journey myself, which I wrote about in “To the Bat Mobile!! My Mid-Career Transition into AI Safety”—found that connecting authentically with people already doing the work was more valuable than cause-area expertise initially—although developing ‘context’ later in my journey proved essential.
Operations/strategy roles do seem open to career switchers in my experience. As a rough heuristic, worth noting that smaller orgs may expect more cause-specific familiarity since ops roles wear multiple hats, while larger orgs tend to have more specialized roles requiring less cause-specific knowledge (although not a hard rule!). Also, “ops” varies widely between organizations—always check the actual role description to see if it’s focused on finance, HR, compliance, etc or combines everything.
Hi Tania! Your ops/strategy background is relevant for impact organizations—many of the challenges you’re describing (sectoral gaps, positioning transferable skills) are covered in our recent post “Challenges from Career Transitions”.
Your leadership and user-centered design experience could be valuable in impact orgs, though the transition often requires deep networking and strategic upskilling alongside applications—all with a ‘winning or learning’ mindset.
I went through a similar journey myself, which I wrote about in “To the Bat Mobile!! My Mid-Career Transition into AI Safety”—found that connecting authentically with people already doing the work was more valuable than cause-area expertise initially—although developing ‘context’ later in my journey proved essential.
Operations/strategy roles do seem open to career switchers in my experience. As a rough heuristic, worth noting that smaller orgs may expect more cause-specific familiarity since ops roles wear multiple hats, while larger orgs tend to have more specialized roles requiring less cause-specific knowledge (although not a hard rule!). Also, “ops” varies widely between organizations—always check the actual role description to see if it’s focused on finance, HR, compliance, etc or combines everything.
All the best,
Moneer (Career Advisor at Succesif)