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Can a horizontal career move be beneficial?
15 minute read | Karen Young | Article | Career development | General
When it comes to career plans, most of us naturally focus our attention on the next step, but have you thought about the step after the next step? Find out why it’s crucial to determine your future career goals now and how a horizontal career move could help get you there.
Many people look blank when asked where they want to be in five years’ time. Some may mumble an answer, hazard a guess, say they don’t know, or even that they haven’t thought that far ahead yet.
If this sounds familiar, then perhaps it’s time to think about where you want to be in two, three, four, or even five job’s time. Do you want to be working at a higher level doing what you do now, or do you have a goal to work in a completely different sector?
If so, then you need to start doing some preparation work now to ensure you get to where you want to be. A lot of that work will involve developing your skills – some of which you probably don’t even realise you need.
So in this blog, I want to talk to you about the importance of looking ahead in your career. I will talk you through making the right upskilling decisions right now to help get you to where you want to be in the future. That may require horizontal career growth in the short term but taking a horizontal step now can help you to gain bigger promotions later on.
As vertical growth is the expected standard in the professional world, you may think that a horizontal career move isn’t really moving your career forward. However, this isn’t necessarily true and here’s where looking ahead in your career and identifying your skill gaps is important.
If you realise that you’re missing any crucial skills that you need in order to achieve a future career goal, a horizontal move can allow you the opportunity to develop them. So, in this scenario, a horizontal move isn’t hindering your career growth but facilitating that growth in the future.
Keep reading to find out more about the benefits of making a horizontal career move.
Alternatively, contact your local consultant for personalised expert advice on your career.
Before I explain why a horizontal career move can be beneficial, I have to explain what I call the ‘Bucket Story’.
A big part of looking ahead and planning your future career success is that you become more conscious and aware of your current and future skills. I like to use The Bucket Story as a simple and memorable way of helping you to visualise the three sets of different skill types that you need to nurture and develop. It will also help to explain how each of these buckets will become at times more or sometimes less important depending on the stage of your career.
To get started, picture three buckets. What are the buckets for, and what do they contain? Hopefully, you thought about liquid or water, so now imagine that the water inside each bucket represents a different set of skills. As your career changes, you’ll need to ensure there is more water in some buckets and less in others.
Now, I’ll explain a little more about what each essential bucket contains.
When you start out in your career, you are very much learning your trade. The focus in terms of skills development will therefore be on building your technical skills and expertise. At this stage, you are still in the process of becoming an expert, so your technical skills bucket should be brimming with water.
As your career progresses, moving away from the day-to-day tasks and on to managing and directing others to do them, your skill set will subsequently need to develop. As businesses go through unprecedented technological and cultural change, it’s also likely that you will be pulled onto separate multi-department projects. This development in your career will involve learning the key skills required to work in different areas of the business, with varying teams composed of a mixture of capabilities.
When you’re at manager level, you have the opportunity to become involved with projects outside of your day job. These projects will help you to broaden a specific skill set that you otherwise might not have the opportunity to develop.
Here, you’ll need to top up your water level in the niche bucket to accommodate these additional duties. You also have to recognise that when doing a project role, the water level in the technical “day-to-day” bucket will likely reduce, as none of us can do everything at once.
As you transition further into positions of management and leadership, you will naturally become less reliant on your technical skills. Instead, you will depend more on competencies such as influencing, negotiation, leading, planning and developing strategy. Therefore, the water in your technical skills bucket will decrease as you move even further away from the day-to-day doing job and spend more time reviewing.
However, this movement can become something of a balancing act. After all, it’s crucial that you keep some water in your technical skills bucket (and keep it topped up) as you progress. It is important that you retain the ability to review and challenge work in an expert way to maintain credibility with your team and colleagues. Don’t allow it to become empty but you also don’t need to do the technical tasks every single day.
That’s the essence of my ‘Bucket Story’. As you move from job to job and progress within an organisation, the water level within each of these three buckets will be in constant change. If you don’t consciously keep attending to the levels of your three buckets, you may find it difficult to move your career in the direction you want to take it.
As I alluded to in the introduction, I always advise candidates to continually anticipate the job in which they’d like to be in two or more career moves’ time. Many candidates don’t look far ahead enough, preferring to focus on the job they have now, and the one they want next. Instead, candidates should also put the right amount of focus on where the next job could take them in the future.
The next step is to proactively tackle these skills gaps now, to ensure your employability in the future – and here’s how a horizontal career move can help you to do so.
A horizontal growth happens when a person moves sideways from one job to another. This type of development will help to gain the skills, experience and knowledge required to progress their upwards career path in the future.
Normally, people move vertically up the corporate ladder, seeking a new title, status and a higher income. However, a one-off horizontal career move doesn’t necessarily slow your career progression but can jumpstart it instead. A horizontal move can bring an expanded skill set and experience for more vertical career growth in the future.
Take, for instance, the case of a finance manager who has developed a strong skill set in management accounting and calculating profit and loss statements. However, the job that person aspires to be in, in two or three moves’ time, is a finance director. This finance manager then looks up the typical job specifications for this level and seniority of role to understand the skills needed. This research points out that they lack the relevant technical skills in preparing statutory accounts and managing the balance sheet.
In order to get this experience, the finance manager establishes that they need to make a horizontal move across into a more technical financial accounting role. Their plan is to do the job for 12 to 18 months so that they can proactively balance out their skills buckets and set themselves up for that future move. These types of moves are often good to make internally if the opportunity is available. Sometimes you might find that you have to transfer externally if the right job doesn’t exist.
In the above example, the candidate hopes to develop the broad range of skills required to become a finance director by learning the technical skills they’re lacking. So, in this scenario, a horizontal career move can enable them to achieve their long-term career ambitions. Without taking this sideways route, they would neglect the opportunity to upskill now in the areas in which they foresee they would be lacking in the future.
And how does this apply to you? You should invest the time to become more self-aware of the skills you may be lacking to achieve your future career ambitions. Then, crucially, go about proactively upskilling yourself and pursue the experiences that you need to help fill your skills gaps. Without these steps, you may find it harder to achieve everything you hope for in your career.
Ultimately, you and only you are responsible for your own career path. If you have identified a skills gap that holds you back or could prevent you from reaching your future career ambitions, you need to proactively tackle this yourself. Neither your current boss nor your employer will do it for you. It’s entirely up to you to propel yourself down the right path and enhance your career the way you envision.
Your first step should be to explore the options available at your current employer. For instance, there could be the possibility of a secondment, or even job shadowing someone with the skill set you require. Plus, it’s much more likely that you can top up a specific technical skill by making an internal horizontal move, as opposed to applying for an external job.
However, when you have identified the skills gaps you need to fill, this is where your boss may be able to help. While they can’t do the work for you, their experience could be key to helping you to plan the right path and learn the required skills to get to the job you aspire to.
Be open about where you think you need to develop, and explain how you’ve come to this conclusion, as well as why and how you hope to fill your skill gaps. Ask them for their support and guidance, or alternatively speak to a recruiter, who could also help to detail how you can acquire the skills you need to progress.
It’s important to look to the future when it comes to your career and not just be consumed by the here and now. Take the approach of thinking two or more jobs ahead to find it easier to establish where your skills gaps lie. You can then focus on how you can develop these required skills and succeed in your long-term career ambitions.
So, don’t be afraid to make horizontal career moves as they can pay off in the future by allowing you to gain the skills needed for bigger promotions.
Take a look at our career advice page to find expert guidance for every stage of your professional journey.
Karen is a Director and recruiting expert at Hays Accountancy & Finance. She provides strategic leadership to a team of 400 accountancy and finance recruitment professionals across 100 UK offices. With 20 years of finance recruitment experience, Karen has a track record of recruiting top finance talent for businesses across a range of industry sectors and is a trusted industry voice on career planning and market insights.
