Sometimes you don’t just want a new job, you want a radical career change. Perhaps you’ve been in finance and now want to be an acupuncturist, you’re a marketer eager to lead a startup, or you’re an educator looking to shift into catering and event planning.

In these situations, it’s going to take more than listening to a few webinars to build the knowledge or experience you need get to where you want to go. You must set aside a significant amount of time for self-directed learning, formal training, or even a second job to gain the skills for the big leap.

This is not easy, but it is possible.

In my experience as a time management coach, I’ve found these strategies to be the most effective for consistently making time for acquiring brand-new career skills.

Accept the Time Commitment

At the onset, it’s important to recognize that between taking care of your personal life, your main job, and this specific skill-building work, you likely won’t have time for much else. For a major career change to work, you need to be willing to cut back in other areas. That may look like limiting optional items like keeping up on your favorite TV shows, going to happy hours and concerts, and volunteering. And at times, you may need to scale back on essential activities. For example, maybe you can still go for runs, but training for a marathon is out of the picture. Perhaps you can still get an acceptable amount of sleep at night throughout the week, but sleeping in on the weekends is no longer in the cards. Or maybe you make sure to have quality time with your family every day, but need to go to class or work on learning once the kids are in bed.

I don’t recommend that you sacrifice your health or most important relationships to make this change work. But you do need to commit a significant amount of time if you plan to leave your current career.

Pick Your Focus

If you’ve decided you really are serious about making a huge career shift and you’ve set aside the time, you need to then research what’s required for your new field. That could be an education program that sets you up for formal licensing or certification, or it could be more independent learning or side hustle work.

Before you put in a lot of time, make sure you know where that time counts. If you must do a formal program to legally practice in your new profession, put your extra time into the prerequisite courses and applications and then, once you’re accepted, the required coursework. Don’t spend lots of time on self-directed learning where you’re not getting credit for what you’re doing. The opposite is true if a formal program isn’t necessary. You might be significantly delaying your success by going back to school, when you could be taking advantage of other ways to acquire skills and gain experience already at your fingertips.

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