February Newsletter: How to Navigate Your Career from Public to Private Sector

Moving from the public to private sector is much easier than doing it the other way around because the major pathway into and among private sector employers is through a hidden job market that is largely unavailable in the government setting. This hidden job market isn’t all that mysterious either.  It is based on the fact that most people get jobs before they are publicized by executing a strategy that focuses on building effective external relationships and profiling employment targets based on need indicators rather than the job itself.

Need indicators are data points that suggest that a company might need a solution you can provide but have not yet moved toward addressing it. Examples could be turnover in your target role, market expansion, M&A, new products, quality issues, impending regulation, operational inefficiency, poor compliance, etc.

If you think about it, there are only two reasons companies hire anyone: (1) They lost someone who must be replaced, or (2) they need more people than they currently have to achieve their goals. Maintaining awareness of people’s movement and need indicators is the key to leveraging the hidden job market.

Career change and job search are impossible to cover in a single newsletter. Anyone who hasn’t looked for a private sector job in a while should check out my December 2024 newsletter that hits the 12 key points of career navigation. It is set up in a “table of contents” format so that you can easily do deeper dives to drill down to the stuff you are curious about.

The Four Pillars of Change

Step 1: Target the right roles:

If you are currently working in the government or military, you may be unclear about where you would best fit in the private sector. This can be quite disorienting for the uninitiated because companies create all kinds of weird titles for the same jobs and often use different definitions for the same titles.

The best way to identify roles to target is to look at what the jobs do vs. what they are called. When I am called upon to do this with my clients, the starting point is to create an inventory of skills that tend to show up repeatedly when they focus on what they enjoy and are good at doing. I use professional accomplishments as the source code for this so that we have stories in place from the get-go that inform a future employer about how we have used our killer skills to produce results in the workplace.

Once we have defined the skills and achievements we want to transfer, we can use job sites (Indeed is great for this) to look for jobs that ask for those skills and outcomes. This is a great way to get a broad sense of possibilities from which you can whittle down based on both interest and viability.

Step 2: Align Your Verbiage on your resume and LinkedIn profile:

Avoid public sector or military jargon and acronyms. Focus instead on using verbiage from the job postings that are representative of the kinds of jobs you would be targeting. If the language from your public sector job description doesn’t appear in any private sector job postings it is probably best not to include it. It is never a good idea, after all, to run the risk of confusing your suitors with phrases they have to Google.

When we build resumes for our Job Guy clients, we always want to remember that computers eliminate 75% of candidates across the board. It is safe to presume, based on these numbers, that job seekers whose resume language best matches the job postings are most likely to make the cut. To meet this challenge, we do as much as we can to truthfully claim as broad a cross section of these “keywords” as possible within the professional experience section of documents.

If we absolutely have to use acronyms, we will spell them out to make it easier to understand by those who may not be familiar with them.

3. Focus on accomplishments

Contrary to popular belief, most people don’t land a new role primarily because they can perform the duties of the job. The prescreening process eliminates those who obviously can’t. Candidates who win the job typically outperform their competitors on two levels: (1) showing how they have delivered results similar to what is needed in the new role and (2) demonstrating that they are fully committed to excellence and will fit in well with others.

Most human and AI advisors emphasize the importance of quantifying accomplishments on resumes. I agree that numbers are great…provided they are the right numbers. It is important that numbers used in a resume demonstrate the correct scale, otherwise they have the opposite effect. The most common example of this is using a resume that claims 30+ years of executive leadership experience for a job that wants 5 to 7 years as a first line manager.

Always prepare accomplishments that will be needed in the job you want next. When asked to share achievements in interviews, prioritize the ones that relate best over those that just mean the most to you personally.

Focusing on producing top results is critically important in effective resume building, nailing job interviews, and developing a network of enthusiastic advocates.

4. Build a productive professional network

Most people in the private sector get jobs at the stage at which a company needs to bring someone on board but has not yet publicized that need. This can be a formal position that has not yet been circulated, but it is even better timing when an employer recognizes a business opportunity that requires bringing on talent but when the process to generate candidate flow has not yet begun.

The perfect time to change sectors or industries is always before the employer invites competition from folks who are already doing similar work in the same industry. Once employers have decided on their list of qualifications, they will almost always prefer on-the-job experience in a context that is as close as possible to what they want done.

Building a network of influencers in the new target industry is key to tapping into the hidden job market. Ideal contacts fall into two major groups: those who work in the departments you might target and those who are their trusted advisors (colleagues, vendors, advisors, funding sources, consultants, etc.).

My most rewarding career change stories are always about those folks who were able to get in front of the right person at the right time and blow them away with their confidence and enthusiasm for doing a great job in something they had not literally done before. And it has almost always happened when competition has not yet been created…through leveraging the hidden job market.

For more on getting a job through networking, click here.