Does experience outside my current field still count?
Think about all the jobs you have had.
Maybe your first job was as a server, a babysitter, a dog walker, or a cashier at a grocery store. Over time, you moved into a corporate role, a trade, or another profession. You might have worked across several industries before arriving where you are today.
Then, somewhere along the way, you started treating only the experience within your current field as valuable. Somewhere, someone taught you that everything else in your life was no good.
I see this when working with coaching clients. Someone has years of experience to draw from, but they mentally set aside everything that happened before they entered their current profession.
There can be a lot of value in those earlier experiences. A lot!
This is a slightly different question from, “How do I use my experience to get a job in a different field?” There is overlap, and I will explore that question separately when discussing career changes. Here, the focus is on using what you have already learned to do your current work differently or better.
You can start doing that in the job you have today.
What can my earliest jobs tell me about how I work?
When I walk through someone’s career with them, I often find patterns that appeared very early and continue showing up much later.
That is one reason I go all the way back to the first job in the career timeline exercise. Those early experiences can offer clues about what interested you, how you approached problems, and what you naturally paid attention to.
For some of us, those jobs also happened before we had absorbed a bunch of expectations about how a professional should look, act, or think. There may have been more room for parts of ourselves that we later learned to suppress or reshape to fit a workplace. Many times, we felt we had to abandon ourselves just to avoid being fired. Especially when biases and levels of oppression show up.
When I explore those earlier stories with clients, I often see connections to the work they enjoy and the way they operate today.
You do not have to walk your entire career timeline to begin noticing this. Start with one earlier job and one thing you learned there.
Experience does not become irrelevant simply because it happened outside your current field.
How can different professions use the same underlying skill?
Sometimes the connection is fairly direct.
Take product management and product marketing. Both can involve interviewing buyers and customers to understand what they need, what frustrates them, and what they care about.
A product manager might use those conversations to inform what the product should do: what would solve a customer’s problem, encourage someone to buy, or give them a reason to stay?
A product marketer might use those conversations to develop messaging: how do we explain the problem, show that the product addresses it, and communicate why that matters?
The purposes differ but there is a shared ability underneath them.
You need to ask useful questions, listen beyond the first answer, understand the underlying problem, and translate what you learn into something other people can use.
If you have developed that ability in one field, you have something relevant to bring to the other. You still need to understand the context and what the work requires, but you are carrying forward experience in how to learn from a customer.
This is where I would start looking at your current responsibilities.
What do you actually have to do to accomplish them? What sits underneath the deliverable? What are all those individual skill sets you need that everything else sits on top of?
Then ask: where else have you used that ability? You may find evidence of it in a part of your career you had stopped including in your story.
What if the jobs seem completely unrelated?
This is where I think the exercise becomes really interesting, and is one of my favorite places to explore with someone.
Imagine someone who used to be a software developer and now works in demand generation. On the surface, those can feel like very different careers: different tools, different outputs, and different day-to-day activities.
It would be easy to dismiss the earlier experience before investigating what it contributes.
I would encourage you to give the connection a chance. The farther apart two experiences seem, the more interesting and fun I often find the exploration.
Consider an even less obvious pairing: working as a restaurant server and working as a software engineer.
A server has to understand how different parts of the restaurant work together. There are customers, other servers, the kitchen, the point-of-sale system, and the sequence of activities that gets an order from a conversation to someone’s table.
Information has to move between those parts. Timing matters. A mistake or delay in one place can affect what happens somewhere else.
A software engineer may also need to understand separate components, how they connect, what information passes between them, and what happens when one part does not behave as expected.
Information also has to move between those parts. Timing also matters. A mistake or delay in one place also can affect what happens somewhere else.
Two wildly different jobs with the same underlying concepts.
The technical skills are different. But there is a useful connection in learning to understand an interconnected system and the flow of information through it.
Now ask the more interesting question:
How could what I learned as a server make me a better software engineer?
Perhaps that experience taught you to pay close attention to handoffs. Perhaps you learned to look beyond the place where a problem becomes visible and investigate what happened earlier. Perhaps you became particularly aware of how one change affects several other parts of a system.
How do I find the connection in my own experience?
I would encourage you to write a short article answering this question:
How has an earlier job helped me become better at the work I do today?
Pick a job outside your current profession. It could be your first job, a role in another industry, or something you rarely mention anymore. Even an experience such as refereeing soccer games can give you something fun to play with.
Work through three questions:
- What did that earlier job teach me to do? Think of a specific situation. What did you have to notice, understand, coordinate, or decide?
- Where does that same ability appear in my current profession? Look beneath the tools and job titles for the connection.
- How does that earlier learning help me do my current work better? Explain how it changes a question you ask, a decision you make, or the way you approach a problem.
Go beyond saying that both jobs require communication or teamwork (those are the obvious ones, really push yourself on this!). Describe what you learned about communicating or working with others, and why that particular lesson matters now.
If you cannot yet point to an example in your current work, describe how you could apply the lesson to a task you are facing. Keep that distinction clear: something you want to try is different from something you have already seen work.
How does this become part of my craft?
Your craft develops through how you bring your experience and perspective into the work you do.
That includes experience from outside your current profession. A lesson learned in a restaurant, on a playing field, or in an entirely different industry can influence what you notice and how you respond to a problem today.
Writing out the connection helps you recognize it. Using that understanding intentionally gives you a way to develop it further.
You may discover that something you thought belonged to an old chapter of your career has been shaping your work all along. Once you can explain how it helps, you can begin using it with more intention.
You are already carrying the experience. Developing your craft can begin with recognizing what it has taught you.
And let me tell you, I would LOVE to read a story about how being a soccer referee made you a better software developer!!!
