Switching industries is tough but achievable in a normal job market. In a weak labor market, however, the dynamics change and otherwise good advice can actually work against you.
Job hunting during market downturns can be difficult and disheartening. People mean well when they offer job search advice, but not all advice is good. A colleague of mine recently vented some frustration on LinkedIn with some commonly offered job search advice:
One piece of advice that I've found useless in the job hunt is to look to other industries. Finance and healthcare are industries I've specifically been pointed towards. The trouble there is that they don't seem to want to hire anyone who doesn't already have experience in their industry.
While operations and sales are often industry specific, skills like accounting, software development, project management, and many others are more general. So, is this a viable job search strategy? The answer, as is often the case, is: it depends.
Consider trying to find a cab. In cities like New York, locals like me know the flow. On an early Saturday night, cabs take people from the residential areas on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side down (south) to neighborhoods with bars, clubs, and hot restaurants. If you want a cab, you may have trouble getting one on a southbound avenue. Simply walking over to a northbound avenue (which is every other avenue in NYC), and you find the empty cabs. At the end of the night, it reverses as northbound cabs take people back home and southbound cabs are empty, so easier to hail. If you have trouble finding a cab, you may want to try hailing one in a slightly different spot.
But what happens when it starts to rain heavily (especially when its unexpected)? Every open cab disappears. It’s not that if you just walk a block over suddenly, you’ll find plenty of available cabs. In the rain, the dynamics shift across the entire market (city). The advice of trying the next avenue over doesn’t help.
Finding a job in a down market is like trying to hail a cab in the rain. The fundamentals have shifted. In the cab analogy you’re still no worse off trying the alternative avenue. Unfortunately, as we’ll see in the down job market, you will be.
As I wrote in Chapter 1. Career Plan of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You, to switch industries you may need to have an intermediary role. Like crossing a river, you may not be able to do it in one jump but might need to hop to a stone or two in the river before you can to the other side. The key is to identify the skills gap between your current role and your target role in the new industry and find jobs that will allow you to close the gap.
That’s the theory, now what about the practice? In practice, while it can work in normal or strong labor markets, it doesn’t work in a down market (meaning a weak labor market). In today’s labor market (2025) companies get literally thousands of applicants per role. That’s not an exaggeration. Even if many are not qualified, they still have quite a few who are. For starters, when trying to just filter at the top of the funnel, whether by traditional software, recent AI, or by hand, they’ll start by applying rather strict filters.
More generally, companies don’t hire for your upside potential. Instead, they hire you to fit into what they think is a well-defined role (even if it’s usually not) and generally want to minimize downside risk (meaning the chance that you may not do well in the role). In down markets, companies think they don’t have to make tradeoffs. If they want fifteen years of experience in an industry for a role, they are more likely to reject someone with only twelve years of experience; this is because they know they can find someone with fifteen years. In a strong labor market, where finding candidates is harder, the company will be more willing to compromise and not hold out for the full fifteen years.
When it comes to switching industries, that’s a big red flag. The reality is, smart, hardworking people can pick up what’s different in a new industry pretty easily (in most cases, some heavily regulated industries may have a little more of a barrier and a little more risk if something is missed). The problem is that companies don’t know how to identify smart, hardworking people. As noted in the article “The Streetlamp Effect in Hiring,” companies hire based on what’s easy to assess, not on what matters most. “How many years of experience do you have and is it more or less than fifteen?” That’s easy to assess. “How much experience do you have in our industry?" Also easy to assess. “How smart are you and how quickly can you learn new terminology and industry norms?” That’s very hard to assess during an interview process. Consequently, a company won’t want to risk that they get it wrong and hire the wrong person, especially in a down market when there are other candidates who do have the experience.
You may note that maybe those other candidates are as smart and hardworking, maybe even more so. You’re right. But since the company can’t assess that dimension, they simply ignore it (or they assess it poorly and so limit the weight of that dimension) and consequently hire based on what they can assess.
As an example, accounting rules apply to every company in every industry. Accounting for a company with SaaS revenue (meaning monthly software subscription revenue) and IP (intellectual property) is different from a company with large physical inventory (particularly with perishable goods), shipping and storage costs, and factory amortization in terms of how certain activities are listed on the books. On day one an accountant from one field might not know how to account for every case in the other. But I also believe any halfway decent accountant can learn the differences fairly quickly. If a company is only going to have one accountant, then yes, she should be from that industry. On the other hand, if you have a team of a few accountants, then hiring one without the deep industry knowledge is less critical since colleagues can fill in the knowledge gaps the first few weeks. While this new hire might take slightly longer to get up to speed by a few weeks, remember that you’re hiring to optimize productivity over years, not weeks. But again, a company will see it as an added risk, and an unnecessary one when so many accountants do have the right industry experience.
The solution to the disappearing cabs was surge pricing from rideshare companies. You can get a vehicle in a downpour, but you will have to pay for the privilege. You can get a job in a down market, but in this case the “surge pricing” is the higher standard companies will hold job seekers to.
Changing industries is hard, but doable in a normal job market. It gets considerably harder in a down market. That’s not to say it's impossible. The right connection into a company or catching the right person who does look beyond the streetlamp can lead to such offers even in a down market. But those are the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately, during tough times the advice to look into other industries, while well intended, is actually a poor use of your time.
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