Hi Antonia, I’m not an expert in the animal space, but my soft sense here is:
as Evan wrote, your prior exp is likely more relevant than you think and you should use your CV to explain how in the way Evan mentioned—titles are a bit less important than types of things you did (e.g., I imagine being a vet did involve a bunch of planning and juggling priorities and optimising processes).
The animal welfare space even more so than other spaces does thrive on connections and relationships—going to conferences and connecting e.g. via Hive can be really beneficial both to get information and hear about opportunities
Internships and volunteering are particularly common I’d say and super useful ways to move into the space and new types of roles. Given the effective animal advocacy space is so small, having a great reference from a known org doing a project for them or e.g. organising a meetup or mini-conference can open many doors and puts that recent experience on your CV
Personally, at AIM we get a lot of people with (human medicine) clinical backgrounds. To us, clinical backgrounds generally indicate 1. altruism/impact drive, 2. empathy, 3. ability to juggle and fix difficult, potentially high pressure situations, 4. general competency, from finishing the education and getting the job.
If you haven’t already, it can also be useful to spend a bit of time figuring out what types of roles are a really great fit for you. I’m mentioning this because a lot of the human medicine clinical background folks we get at AIM end up on average being better fits for smaller, more early stage orgs where they can be a generalist, things are pretty urgent, and they see the impact of their work more directly. A “project manager” role at a small org will end up being a very different role, and look for quite different traits and amounts of experience (spoiler: much less), than a “project manager” role in a 50+ people org.
Hi Antonia, I’m not an expert in the animal space, but my soft sense here is:
as Evan wrote, your prior exp is likely more relevant than you think and you should use your CV to explain how in the way Evan mentioned—titles are a bit less important than types of things you did (e.g., I imagine being a vet did involve a bunch of planning and juggling priorities and optimising processes).
The animal welfare space even more so than other spaces does thrive on connections and relationships—going to conferences and connecting e.g. via Hive can be really beneficial both to get information and hear about opportunities
Internships and volunteering are particularly common I’d say and super useful ways to move into the space and new types of roles. Given the effective animal advocacy space is so small, having a great reference from a known org doing a project for them or e.g. organising a meetup or mini-conference can open many doors and puts that recent experience on your CV
Personally, at AIM we get a lot of people with (human medicine) clinical backgrounds. To us, clinical backgrounds generally indicate 1. altruism/impact drive, 2. empathy, 3. ability to juggle and fix difficult, potentially high pressure situations, 4. general competency, from finishing the education and getting the job.
If you haven’t already, it can also be useful to spend a bit of time figuring out what types of roles are a really great fit for you. I’m mentioning this because a lot of the human medicine clinical background folks we get at AIM end up on average being better fits for smaller, more early stage orgs where they can be a generalist, things are pretty urgent, and they see the impact of their work more directly. A “project manager” role at a small org will end up being a very different role, and look for quite different traits and amounts of experience (spoiler: much less), than a “project manager” role in a 50+ people org.
All the best! :-)
thank you so much Judith!