JT11 | Rivana Mezaya On Making Career Transitions

Discussion Topics: Rivana Mezaya on Making Career Transitions

• Key things to know when planning a successful career transition
• Reflecting and researching about yourself before the change
• Humility is just not a fancy word
• Fake it till you take it

Transcript: Rivana Mezaya on Making Career Transitions

Welcome to another episode of JobTok. Hi Meza, thanks so much for joining us today. Before we begin, tell us a little bit about your crazy career journey!

Hello, I’m Meza from Jakarta, Indonesia and I was trained as a lawyer, with a passion in public policy and deliverology. I have worked in law firms, NGOs, IGO, the government (President and Minister’s Office), and University, and am currently enjoying my latest learning round in the private sector in a tech company. When I was a lawyer, I dealt with legal opinion, chasing state assets in corruption cases, debottlenecking the biggest geothermal project after 30+ years of delay, and now crafting business development strategies. I have been at the same table with ministers, students, and ride-hailing drivers. Throughout the journey, I found that my core competence is founded by the structures given through a legal discipline and also the skills of deliverology. And I found that regardless of what the type of work is, I seem to be seeking roles that I can learn from and give an impact as well.

Wow you’ve done stuff that people like me can only dream of! I feel like I should launch a true crime podcast just so I can talk to you about all the corruption cases heh heh.

Also, a key point in what you said is that all this variety of things is tied to a single core competency, which is deliverology. What is that?

Maybe there are other names for this. Deliverology, in my understanding, is in short the science of delivery. The term was originally used in government delivery units, like in the pioneering UK Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, and in the Indonesian one a decade ago, which is essentially the art of managing and monitoring implementations of big-impact programs in a complex setting. In governments, it is often about successfully executing campaign promises and priorities of an administration, but I think it is applicable anywhere else as well.

Understood. Now the point about leveraging a single core competence is a very valuable point, because it means that anyone can move into any field, as long as they have a skillset that can be extended creatively into that field. I’m sure that’s something a lot of people will find comforting, because it means you don’t have to build a whole range of new skills to execute a career transitions

Speaking of change though, what is that that keeps you moving into so many different areas?

I’ve always been drawn to “what do I want to learn or experience” not “what I want to be”. Thus early on, I realized I would not aim at a linear career; rather aim to complete my own career curriculum. This curriculum represents the abilities, perspectives, and experiences that I as a person should have, to maximize my impact/contribution as part of society. For example, people who have known me for a while would be surprised that I am now doing BD in a private company, but for me this is the time in my syllabus or curriculum to learn and gain first-hand experiences relating to decision-making in the private sector, so I could understand the POV. This is to complement my previous experience in the heart of the government where I was privy to various decision-making from the public sector POV.

OK, so people talk about a learning curve but you’re taking it all the way – literally treating your entire career as one big university course. That is an extraordinary point of view, Meza. I hope in that world graduation means retirement!

So now that you’ve made all these changes, what do you think are key things people need to know or plan to make a successful career change?

If you’re thinking of career transitions, I would divide it into 3 things –

• Pre-change – put on our ambitious gear. Reflect and research about ourselves (skills, passion, and why change) as well as the area/place we want to change into.
• Post-change – after taking that brave decision to change, shift gear to humility to be able to observe and absorb.
• Along the way – keep small pit-stops to check in with ourselves, with family, mentally, spiritually, financially.

OK so first we should be ambitious about the change itself. Could you elaborate a bit about that?

In my experience, when thinking about a change, we need to be ambitious. This word has kind of a bad connotation, especially for a woman in Asian culture. In this context, it is important to embrace this mindset to pursue some answers as to why and how we are making the change – in other words, to be informed. I like to draw parallel with the business judgment rule in corporate law which basically protects corporate officers from liability where they have made decisions in good faith, including after being reasonably informed and using appropriate procedures, even if those decisions turn out to be poor or unwise and result in a loss. I like this rule because it recognizes that we can make mistakes in decision making, including about a career change, but the important thing is to make sure how we come to that decision. Being informed for me means being informed about myself, and about the external conditions. If you allow me to elaborate further – First is to look inward and challenge ourselves – why we want the change, where we are right now, what we already have. Do we want to change because of utter contempt for our current boss or coworkers, or the type of work itself, or we have  a different passion? What is our capital to move forward? Our network, our particular skills? Are we ready to take any financial hit? We could check on our own “life curriculum” as a reference.

We also need to look outward and research the area or place we want to move to. Do some research as well about the sector. Not google search or adopt mainstream assumptions. For example – government work is bureaucratic, and tech is culturally fun. Should commit to doing things like talk to people already there and who have already left, conduct informational interviews, and taking advantage of your network to find out not just about the job, but about the boss, the culture, and any other information. Ultimately, we would want to be able to as closely as possible match the answers from the looking-inward and looking-outward process. When the going gets tough during career transitions, this is where we would look back for strength, because we would have some confidence that we have the Why and that this change answers our why. We will never have perfect confidence or information. But at least if we are ambitious enough to seek for some answers, we would be less tempted to look back with what ifs.

Got it, so essentially because it’s a change and not just a step forward, by definition it will be ambitious and we need to do our homework and self-reflection to make a good enough decision so we don’t regret or second guess ourselves later.

So now that we’ve made the change, you suggested we need to actually leave aside our ambition and actually step ahead with humility. Why’s that? Isn’t the change the hard part?

After we make the change, in my experience shifting gear to humility could help us navigate the change. This is tricky since as the new kid on the block, we would want to show we could perform well or add some exceptional added value. However, having our sense of humility guide us, does not actually prevent us from doing that. Our humility would enable us to observe and absorb what is happening around us, validating or defeating our assumptions, point us to the direction of people whom we should talk to and creating a new network as we go along, and maintaining internal sanity.

Ok, understood. So the change is only a step but if we want to make it successful, we need to keep an open mind, which is where we need to have the humility to learn from scratch. You also mentioned something about pit stops on the way. What’s that about?

During the change, I believe it is important to keep small pit-stops to check in about many things – checking in with ourselves, with family, mentally, spiritually, and financially. Change of career does not happen in a vacuum, as the rest of our world keeps going despite our going through a career change. That’s why building awareness of how the change has affected us, our closest ones, and our finances, could help us respond, and ultimately survive the change.

For example, we might take pay cuts to go do something that we have dreamt to do. We might have some plans on how to deal with it. But we need to check in with family and check whether our plans are working, to recognize issues earlier and thus enable us to respond and manage the stress of the change.

Oh ok, so the check-ins are to ensure the decision-making process and plans are actually happening as we intended and nothing is going off track. Makes sense. By the way, I love the point you made ‘career change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The rest of the world keeps moving irrespective of our own journey. So true isn’t it? We might think we’re doing great things, but life goes on!

And sometimes life also knocks us down right? Things go wrong sometimes. In all these moves, have you ever faced doubts about what you’re doing?

Definitely. It might sound heroic to say “I want to learn new things”, but sometimes we forget that the learning process might be painful. One of the stronger pains might be from handling our own doubts.

After the change we made, we need to deal :

• Humility to recognize shortcomings (or people might say our room for improvements) and help needed
• Be genuine in our intention
• Maintain a good feedback loop – from your manager, peers

Let’s face it, we will be asked to do something we don’t know how in a new place – Ultimately – you are allowed to fake it- coz fake it ’til you make it means you still make it.

Fake it ’til you make it still means you are making it! Meza you are full of quotes today, aren’t you? I can totally see that on a t-shirt.

Thanks so much for this conversation – I really loved every bit of what you said, so let me just summarize for our listeners:

• Anyone can change careers as long as they can anchor the change on a core competence that extends to the new industry or role
• Since we are making a major change, we should be ambitious in terms of what we want and do the groundwork needed to make it a success
• Once we are in the new role, we need to lead with humility so we can learn fast enough to make the change successful
• Finally, from time to time we need to check in against our original plan so we know we are on the right track
• And if you find things going wrong, as long as you take feedback, have genuine intention and continue to learn you will eventually succeed – so just keep going

And, as a reminder to listeners, if you have any questions, please click the link in the description and head over to our website so you can submit them. Meza has kindly offered to answer all of our questions via a subsequent blog post.

Meza, thanks a lot for joining us today. Really appreciate your time.

And to our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in. We were Rivana Mezaya and Amit with JobTok. See you next time.