Nine Questions to Guide Your Job Search

by Laura Gassner Otting, President, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group

(This article is excerpted from Change Your Career: Transitioning to the Nonprofit Sector

available now on Amazon.com.)

 

Knowing you want to work in the nonprofit sector is easy. It’s often been described by career changers as something they couldn’t not do. It’s a fire in the pit of your stomach, a yearning for more, a decision that life is more than a paycheck. Yet figuring out just where you fit into this vast and wide-ranging sector is not so easy. The following questions will help you begin to determine where and what you can do.

What skills are in your toolbox?

Knowing what you can do and what you have done is important, but don’t get trapped by your current title or your current job. After all, it’s the job you’re looking to leave, likely for good reason. Simply replicating your for-profit job in the nonprofit sector gets you no more than a smaller paycheck. Think more deeply about what you do now and what you have done in other jobs so that your career change choices reflect the whole you, not just the most recent version.

On your résumé, remember to include work you may have done as a member of an ad hoc office committee, regardless of whether it involved your official line duties or not. Examine your projects and highlight any and all skills you have developed by completing each of the tasks involved. Regardless of how relevant these skills and tasks seem to your current job, they may matter greatly in your next one.

Where did you collect the experiences you will bring to your next job?

Not all experiences are gained through paid employment. Rather, much of the most fulfilling, most educational, and most relevant experience for the nonprofit job you seek may have come from volunteer work. Meaningful work is meaningful work, whether or not you got paid.

Looking at the larger collection of skills is particularly relevant for those just coming back into the workplace after getting an advanced degree or caring for a family member, or who have held the same job for a lengthy period of time. A certain amount of amnesia sets in, and a malaise about qualifications is not uncommon. Dusting off the old résumé and tacking on your most recent job does a disservice to you and your job hunt. Add all of your experiences, paid or volunteer, to the equation when determining the full scope of skills you bring to bear. They may add up to more than you think.

What would you do if you could do anything at all?

As you have learned in the first section of this book, the nonprofit sector is enormous and varied. You can do virtually anything you want to do in a nonprofit that exists and, if not, start one of your own. Consider this famous question: “If you won the lottery, what would you do tomorrow?”

Allow yourself to dream, and dream big. After all, if you are moving into the nonprofit sector to fulfill that certain something inside of you, why not go all the way? The time is now, and the price is right. Besides, the nonprofit sector is filled with dreamers just like you. You can always scale back or get creative when faced with unexpected realities that crop up during your job search. But until that happens, allow yourself to be carried away by the fantasy of making real change in the issue area or community of your choice. You will find that your enthusiasm is infectious and will excite those around you to help you more.

Which of your skills will transfer into the nonprofit sector?

Some skills transfer more easily than others. Most duties that fall under the operations, administration, and finance functions are easily transferable, even if there are some new rules or technology to learn. Some, like community building and fund development, can transfer well after a bit of tweaking. Other skills, those heavily reliant on subject matter expertise, are much more difficult to fit into your new nonprofit job, unless the nonprofit focuses in that area. For example, a marketing director focused on selling to educational outfits may be able to bring a quiver filled with both functional and subject matter arrows to a job raising money for a charter school association. On the other hand, an eye doctor will bring a deep understanding of the medical community and its support of blind children, but a lifetime of clinical expertise will not apply when budgeting, dealing with funders, or signing off on press releases. Those skills must come from elsewhere.

Many skills you have gathered are likely transferable to the nonprofit sector. However, before starting to write your résumé, make sure that the skills you think will transfer are in line with the requirements of the new position or the level of position you seek. The eye doctor just discussed, for example, might point to a track record running a successful, 200-patient practice, developing community support around an eye care program in local schools, and lobbying the state to earmark funds to an “Eye Care for the Elderly” program.

What traits have brought you success?

In most cases, subject matter expertise is only part of what has enabled you to succeed in your career thus far. Your personality, the way you go about doing your work or managing the work of others, and your general demeanor in the office complete the picture. You may be the type of person who operates well under pressure and in turnaround situations, or you may be better in a more stable environment where crises rarely pop up. You may be able to get the best from legions of young, idealistic, energetic upstarts, or you may be more skilled at managing a smaller cadre of seasoned professionals. You may enjoy a highly charged political atmosphere, or you may thrive, instead, in an environment where agendas are more transparent.

Each nonprofit has its own personality. Some of these personalities reflect the organization’s issue arena. For example, human rights organizations tend to be more in-your-face with younger, idealistic staffers, while institutions of higher education tend to be more staid and steady. Yet in each of these categories, there are always exceptions. Discerning what environment brings out your best traits and allows you to flourish and finding a nonprofit that offers such an environment will allow you to enjoy your nonprofit work more.

What type of formal education do you have?

Without a great deal of work experience, formal education determines what, substantively speaking, you are qualified to do. This is the whole of your subject matter expertise. For those just coming out of school, or with only one job under their belt, education is of paramount importance and will be weighted heavily by the hiring manager. What you know matters, and what you know has mainly come from schooling at this point.

For those who have been in the working world a bit longer, education is only one part of the equation. In some cases, like medicine or the law, a formal degree is a state requirement. Also, social workers and teachers must be licensed, and stock traders and accountants must pass certain exams. In other cases, like fundraising or association management, a degree or certificate is not a requirement but provides a leg up against other candidates. Determine what your formal education qualifies you to do and what degrees or certificates you might need to grab the job of your dreams.

Some managers, especially those in the foundation world, find that a deep, substantive knowledge of the work funded or being done by their grantees is vital to a candidate’s success once on board. This is often borne out by a long career in the field or, for foundations, more likely a PhD in the subject area. In some cases, however, attaining more education is unrealistic. You are unlikely to enter medical school when you are 45, although certainly it has been done, and you are probably not going to get a PhD in oceanography to work at the Jacques Cousteau Foundation (however fun that may seem).

In other cases, degrees that teach skills and not subject matter expertise, such as programs on nonprofit management, fundraising, accounting, and operations, are easily attainable and make sense strategically. This type of education provides you with a current nonprofit peer group, access to a career center, and a mind filled with the best nonprofit thinking of the day. The second half of this chapter discusses additional educational resources in more detail.

What kinds of on-the-job training have you received?

Many job seekers have received enough on-the-job training to write a PhD thesis on the work that they do. In most cases, however, they just don’t realize how much they’ve learned along the way. Figuring this out demands critical thinking about where you came from, your initial expectations of your career’s trajectory, and where you have ended up.

What did you hope to get from your career? Are you there? What changed along the way? What do you do now that you never imagined you would be doing? What more do you know now than when you started this job, or the last job, or the job before that? And, again, don’t forget about the community service, nonprofit volunteering, or board work that you have done. Each of your days has brought a lesson, and each lesson is valuable to your job search in some way. What have been your lessons?

What motivates you to make this move?

If you are switching sectors, you may find yourself applying for jobs that seem completely unconnected to where you have been and what you are currently doing. However, a unique, often life-altering experience as a volunteer, an illness in the family, or a major world catastrophe are often exactly the right, and perfectly plausible, times to make such a dramatic change. If properly framed, your underlying motivation will make sense to the person judging your candidacy.

Consider those people looking for the nonprofit sector lifestyle: that idyllic world where people don’t work that hard and go home early on Fridays, where accountability is scant and responsibility is shared, where everyone is kind and sweet and no one ever fights. That world is about as realistic as the mirage of an oasis in the desert.

Times have changed, the nonprofit sector has changed, and the jobs within it have changed, too. Expect to work harder than you ever have but for a cause you deeply love.

Think about your underlying motivation to make this move. Is your motivation just a passing fancy that will flame out when met with rough times, frustration, and defeats? Or is it from deep within your core that will enable you to face down the difficulties inherent to the nonprofit sector and make an organization’s dream a reality for all? Ask yourself tough questions about how you really feel about this major career change and keep asking until you feel you have an honest answer. This is what will drive your job search, your enthusiasm, and your ability to make change a reality.

 

Why is this the right time for you to move into this new type of work?

Your children may have left the nest, you may have a sick relative, you may be unable to stomach one more day of corporate profiteering, or you may have benefited greatly from your career and can now write your own rules. Everyone has his or her reasons, and all of them are real and valid. However, only some of them should influence your job search. The timing must have everything to do with how a particular job, including the lifestyle and financial considerations that come with it, play into your present life.

Perhaps your company is downsizing, and this is a move you have always desired. Perhaps you are a board member for a nonprofit whose chief executive just announced plans for retirement. Perhaps you are just coming back to work after raising your children, and because of that life-transforming experience, realize that you cannot go back to the job you held before. Realizing why this is the right time for you, for your family, and for your bank account is key to deciding which kind of job to seek.