LinkedIn finds the most common ways in and out of every career
We recently wrote a career profile on medicine which said that one of the most common exit opportunities for physicians was into academia. How exactly did we know that?
LinkedIn has mined their enormous dataset to find the most frequent career transitions for people from a huge range of different professions. It turns out that the most frequent transfer for a physician or surgeon is to become a university professor, presumably studying or teaching medicine itself. Most roles have several common options.
I strongly recommend playing around with it and reading their analysis. It turns out that ‘sales’ is a huge skill area and one of the most common next steps for people from a very wide range of professions. Almost every business needs some people to work on sales!
You can use this both to see what your natural next career moves are, and figure out what indirect paths you can use to get into a particular different position you have in mind. It doesn’t do the reverse lookup itself yet, so you’ll need to guess which options are most likely to lead you into the one you want.
We’ll be incorporating the wisdom of this tool into our career profiles as we update them.
The broad skill groupings they classified seemed to me to be:
- Sales, hospitality and logistics (blue)
- Health and education (red)
- Information technology (pink)
- Practical trades, manufacturing and engineering (orange)
- Marketing and writing (green)
- Management, consulting and government relations (purple)
- Design and making the world beautiful (light blue)
- Law and executives (light green)