Career Restart Program
Bounce back into the workforce
We are completely need blind. For those who cannot afford this program, they can apply for a scholarship here.
The Network Capital Career Restart Program is designed for professionals who took a break from work and are struggling to find meaningful career opportunities. In this live cohort based course, you will get the skills, networks and 1:1 mentoring support to bounce back into the workforce. Our focus won’t just be enabling you to get a job. We will work relentlessly to build your category of one.
The course will be curated based on your professional requirements. You’ll be connected to your mentors 1:1 for a learning experience tailored to your goals.
In their book “The 100-Year Life – Living and Working in an Age of Longevity”, Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott make three key points. First, people have a real shot at living up to or more than 100 years. Second, the longevity of companies will shrink. Third, the whole concept of retirement and savings will change. The traditional three-stage life — full-time education leading to full-time work leading to full-time retirement — will give way to something a great deal more fluid, flexible, and multi-staged.
Keeping the 100-year life in mind, one of the most important skills of the 21st century will be the ability to reinvent oneself quickly and repeatedly. Even with the best technologies available for free, it can be very hard and lonely to do this alone. Instead, we should harness the power of communities and data science. Peer-to-peer skill sharing can help people discover themselves, and then build careers that have a purpose and meaning. That’s what we are trying to do in our small way at Network Capital
There isn’t a formula to go about rethinking and redesigning one’s career. It involves give phases (at a high level)
- Career exploration and experimentation
- Picking career-product-market fit
- Skill building
- Network Quotient expansion
- Building your category of one
The challenge with restarting your career after a break or trying to do something completely different from your past experience is the starting point. We are all creatures of momentum and habit. If we are in a rut, we end up staying that way. If we are in a hole, we keep digging.
We can be anything we want to be as long as we are ready to start afresh. The key concept here is to look at work life not as a race but like what Reid Hoffman calls “tour of duty”.
Understanding Tour of Duty | HBR
“When Reid founded LinkedIn, he set the initial employee compact as a four-year tour of duty, with a discussion at two years. If an employee moved the needle on the business during the four years, the company would help advance his career. Ideally this would entail another tour of duty at the company, but it could also mean a position elsewhere.
Tour of duty can be 2 or 4 years. Why two to four years? That time period seems to have nearly universal appeal. In the software business, it syncs with a typical product development cycle, allowing an employee to see a major project through. Consumer goods companies such as P&G rotate their brand managers so that each spends two to four years in a particular role. Investment banks and management consultancies have two- to four-year analyst programs. The cycle applies even outside the business world—think of U.S. presidential elections and the Olympics.
In 2003 Matt Cohler was a management consultant who wanted to become a venture capitalist, although he lacked start-up experience. He began working for Reid at LinkedIn, where the two mapped out a two-year tour of duty. After that time was up, he and Reid agreed to extend the tour while they figured out what Matt could do next. Six months later Matt had the opportunity to join Facebook as one of its first five employees. Although Reid didn’t want to lose Matt, he advised him to take the position, which would bring diversity to his start-up experience and move him closer to his goal. After three years at Facebook Matt became the youngest general partner at Benchmark, a prominent venture capital firm.”
What if you are not Reid or Matt?
You can still design your tour of duty using the 5 pronged approach we highlighted above but you need to be patient with results. I love the quote, '“Be impatient with actions, patient with results.”
If you are in sales trying to pivot to product management or if you are out of work trying to figure out what to do next, you need to be realistic with where you are. Getting an accurate assessment of your networks, skills and aspirations will be crucial towards constructing your tour of duty.
You can do it yourself but it will be hard. Lean on your community, activate your strong and weak networks, and most importantly, take the first step. You can’t let your circumstance or your past hold you back permanently.
Some pointers to help you navigate
Start with your curiosity. “Let me take a certification in digital marketing” is perhaps not the way forward. There needs to be a guiding question. Simply taking a certification to plaster on your CV is jumping the gun. You need to articulate a question that sparks your sense of wonder. For example, suppose you have always been interested in art and you have been reading a lot of chatter in the media about NFTs, you could start by trying to figure out a way to merge your interest with art with the broader market trend.
Experiment, rethink and then specialize. You never want to specialize in something just because someone told you to. There is a chance you will realize that you didn’t really care about it. The wasted time and effort will make your search for the next big thing even more elusive.
Step by step, ferociously. This is a phrase often used by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He built one of the world’s largest empires. Even if you are trying to rebuild from scratch, keeping this in mind provides the momentum and confidence to take the next step. You don’t need to get everything right in life. Just a few things done with intention and purpose will do. Watch this video by Warren Buffett.
As you restart your career, think of it as a new beginning with the sense of wonder of a child learning a new language. Your age, experience and general societal noise will bring you down. Your ego might get in the way. You may occasionally feel hopeless or helpless.
Process it. You just need to take the first step and design your tour of duty. We are there for you.
The fellowship journey
- Setting your long-term vision
- Nurturing clarity of thought & communication
- Effective writing & thinking
- Building your tribe of mentors
- Thinking in long-term & playing infinite games
- Building your personal brand
- Scaling yourself through communication
Write your awesome label here.
Goals of the program
1. Help you reflect on your past career and plan your future career (decide what you want to do next)
2. Help you upskill or reskill yourself to set you up for future success. This includes updating you of the latest trends of relevance to your industry (or area of interest) and connecting you to top professionals who will act as your mentors
3. Help you own your narrative and prepare for re-entering the workforce (connecting you to managers and HR professionals who would help rewrite your CV, linkedin profile, pitch deck and prepare you for interviews)
4. Connecting you to the right opportunities including prospect employers, accelerators, investors, remote jobs…
Career Intelligence
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