Glad Gazelle asked
answered 3h ago
Hi Philip! Thanks for being so engaging and responsive on this forum.
If someone wants to switch both their role and industry, which do you think is usually better to change first?
For example, if someone is a Data Scientist in Healthcare field and wants to transition to Product Manager in Entertainment, should they try to become a Health PM first or become an Entertainment DS first?
Roles/industries are hypothetical. But one can guess that the hop to the exact industry and role directly is very hard if no prior experience in both, so the likely options are becoming a PM at a less competitive company (and then switching industries later) or switching industries first in the same role (and then trying to role switch later).
Philip's answer
Changing both role and industry simultaneously is dangerous. Your premise is exactly right: you shouldn't change all the variables all at once. Even within the same company, I recommend people don't change role and team simultaneously. It's much better to change one before the other.
Changing fields is much more dramatic than changing teams in a company. I'm not sure if there's an exact right answer to this, but I'd recommend changing roles first:
DS in Health → PM in Health → PM in Entertainment
The reasoning is around risk reduction. When you change from DS → PM within Health (and ideally within the same company / team, where you already have social capital and coworkers more likely to be patient with you based on your past contributions), you can flip back to DS if the transition to PM proves too difficult. But more importantly, it sets you up to go PM Health → PM Entertainment, which then gives you two outs if an industry transition proves difficult. You could:
Go back into DS in your new industry (Entertainment)
Go back to PM in your old industry (Health)
Whereas if you made the industry/field change first, you only have one option, which is to go back to your previous job (both role and industry).
The real answer for you will be highly dependent on situation and on your own abilities. What I'm recommending here is a theoretical framework with which to think about such a large transition.