Gaining Relevant Experience

Start Before You Leave

 

One of the most effective ways to make a career change feel more credible is to begin building relevant evidence before the move becomes official. This does not need to mean taking on something huge alongside an already busy job. In many cases, the most convincing proof comes from smaller, deliberate actions that steadily show commitment, curiosity and growing capability in the space you want to move into.

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That might involve taking on freelance projects, volunteering your time to support a local organisation, helping a friend’s business with a skill you want to develop, contributing to a community initiative, shadowing someone in the field, or completing a project-based course where you leave with something tangible. For some people, it may look like building a portfolio of practical work, while for others it could be supporting events, workshops, internal projects or community groups that expose them to the type of problems they want to solve professionally.

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Use Your Current Job

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One of the most overlooked ways to gain relevant experience is through the role you already have. Many people assume they need to wait until they leave before they can start building proof, but in reality, your current workplace can often provide some of the strongest stepping stones.

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This might mean volunteering for cross-functional projects, asking to support a new initiative, joining internal working groups, mentoring junior colleagues, presenting to leadership, improving a process, analysing data, helping with training, writing communications, running events, supporting hiring, working more closely with customers, or collaborating with teams adjacent to the function you are targeting.

 

These opportunities often create highly relevant stories because they allow you to demonstrate capability in a familiar environment with real outcomes attached. The added advantage is that this kind of experience tends to feel commercially credible to future employers because it shows you have already started operating in similar territory, even if your job title has not yet caught up.

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Use Side Projects

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Side projects can be one of the clearest ways to understand whether a new direction genuinely suits you. They take an idea out of theory and into lived experience, which is where much stronger decisions begin. This could look like launching a newsletter, writing regularly on a topic connected to the field, designing a small service, creating a workshop, starting a podcast, building a digital product, supporting a start-up, offering informal consulting, creating a portfolio website, redesigning something for a local business, helping a charity improve a process, building prototypes, facilitating small groups, or teaching what you are learning through content or community sessions.

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The benefit is twofold. First, side projects help you discover whether the day-to-day doing of the work actually energises you. Second, they create visible proof of initiative, discipline and real skill-building, which can become incredibly useful in CVs, interviews and networking conversations.

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Turn Learning Into Proof

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Courses and qualifications can absolutely help strengthen a career change, particularly where the new field has genuine technical, regulated or specialist expectations. However, their value increases significantly when the learning is tied to real application.

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For example, a short UX course becomes far stronger when it leads to redesigned user journeys for a real organisation. A coaching qualification becomes more credible when it includes live practice hours. A data course becomes more useful when it leads to dashboards, analysis projects or published insights. A writing course becomes more powerful when it results in a body of published work.

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The principle is to pair learning with outputs. Employers are rarely persuaded by study alone, but what creates confidence is seeing how that learning has already been translated into action and results.

 

Show Your Proof In Different Ways

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Relevant experience does not always need to mirror the final job title directly. In many cases, the strongest proof comes through a wider body of outputs that demonstrate how you think and operate. This could include case studies, testimonials, workshops you have designed, published articles, portfolio pieces, event delivery, project outcomes, community leadership, speaking engagements, research reports, creative work, strategy documents, or client-facing work completed informally.

 

Sometimes even the way you contribute publicly in your target space, through LinkedIn posts, panel contributions, industry communities or thought leadership, can become part of the evidence that you are already active in the field. This broader view is important because it helps people stop waiting for formal permission and start recognising the many ways credibility can already be built.

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Make The Move Feel Credible

 

The real value of gaining relevant experience is that it turns career change from an idea into something visible and believable. Rather than simply saying you are interested in moving into a field, you are able to demonstrate how you have already started developing capability, building outputs within that space.

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This changes how employers interpret your move because the transition no longer feels theoretical. It also changes your own confidence because the new direction starts to feel less like a leap and more like a natural continuation of work already underway, and is often the moment career change begins to feel far more achievable.

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To discuss how Another Path can support your career journey, please get in touch