I Spent Six Months Saying Sorry In Interviews For A Job I Was Actually Good At

There was always one thing I did at every interview when I switched careers.

Before anyone could even ask me about my CV, I'd say, "Okay, I know this looks a bit unusual. I spent eight years in hospitality but..." and then just pause, as if I was confessing to something.

It took me a ludicrously long time to realize that not a single fucker had asked me to apologise and I had been doing it anyway.

All the time.

Before anyone had so much as batted an eyelid.

It feels like starting from absolutely scratch in a different industry.

I’ll be honest, nobody sugarcoats it for you.

Eight years just disappear in your mind and suddenly you’re the least valuable individual on the planet once more.

The perfect time to start applying for jobs is, as most of us discover around week two of unemployment.

It's a real feeling.

And mostly wrong.

That took me an age to realize.

This is the crossroads of a career where you change the direction of your life by thinking differently.

The zero's real. Just a little less than it feels.

I actually did the maths on this, on an actual napkin, believe it or not, which is kind of a weird story as it sounds like something that someone made up.

Technical stuff sits pretty near to zero.

Can't deny that part of the job.

I had no idea what a sprint was.

I thought a backlog was something you dealt with at the launderette during those first two weeks.

There are nastily embarrassing Slack messages out there I hope nobody discovers.

But that is perhaps a third of the real work.

The rest of it, reading a tense room, knowing precisely when and where to push and when to let go, keeping your head when three things are on fire all at once and everyone is demanding your attention in different ways, none of that resets.

I did that every bloody Friday night for about eight years running a restaurant floor that got slammed at 8pm with, more or less, zero warning every single week.

The same chaos, just a different night.

What do you know, managing 40 covers being turned on its head trains a very specific kind of calm that apparently is almost identical to a stakeholder meeting falling apart on the fly.

Genuinely nobody told me that meant anything.

I worked it out entirely by accident, months in.

This industry speak was kinda the easy bit. Annoyingly.

This one totally surprised me honestly.

The tools, the terms, all the "this is what actually makes things happen" stuff was by a long shot the fastest thing to learn.

A few weeks of sitting with someone and learning it, I knew what a sprint was within a month and just really cringed about it for a second.

What really took years, and what I already had without knowing it was worth anything, was judgment.

The ability to detect something beginning to go bad before it actually has gone bad.

Having a good read on when to fight a battle with someone senior and when to leave it alone.

Those skills don't reset.

Ever.

They quietly travel with you to whatever field you're in next.

Learning new skills is the easy part.

Learning to trust the value of the ones you already have is much harder.

It wasn't my skills. It was really my vocabulary.

This is when I actually started getting callbacks, and it had nothing to do whatsoever with learning anything new.

An opening line of "I managed a restaurant floor" led to nothing.

Tolerable small talk at best.

Folks just blinked a little bit.

I changed it to "I ran live operations under constant unpredictable pressure, managed staffing under tight constraints, dealt with immediate escalations from genuinely pissed off people every night for eight years in a row."

Same exact experience.

Fully truthful.

Radically different feeling in the room.

Someone once said, "Uh, that's essentially incident management," and I just agreed with them.

I had never used that expression in my life until that meeting.

Nothing about what I'd actually done changed in any way.

Only the wording surrounding it.

That's most of the real job of changing fields honestly.

Not learning new things.

Learning to describe the old things in a language the new room actually understands.

Stopped apologising once I started externally naming the gap I'll get over on purpose.

My real move was scrapping the "so this may sound strange but" approach and directly saying, "I don't have direct experience in this right now.

Here's what I've been doing about that for the last four months.

And here's what I offer that most people with five years in this field probably don't."

Things changed completely after that.

I didn't feel like I was confessing anything anymore.

I felt like I was actually making a pitch.

The gap didn't disappear.

Obviously not.

It was still there and it was still true.

It just became one concrete thing among a heap of strengths rather than this cloud hanging over everything that I somehow felt forced to point out first.

An interview can be daunting, but remember that you're there to show why they'd be wise to hire you.

My pay did fall. Although not as severely as I had mentally prepared myself for.

Gonna be brutally honest here, because most articles tend to skim over it.

There was a real, tangible financial step back initially.

I had prepared myself for it for years, mostly because I spent far too many nights reading doom-and-gloom forum posts at 1am when I should have been asleep.

In reality, it lasted more like a year and a half.

Not the five-year black hole I had managed to invent entirely in my own head.

Past experience turned out to be worth far more than I expected, particularly the judgment and decision-making parts nobody ever writes about in job descriptions.

I probably should have looked up actual salary figures instead of inventing the worst-case scenario while drinking at one in the morning on a Tuesday.

To be honest, the thing that really got me through it was

It wasn't talent.

It wasn't luck either, though from the outside every successful career switch strangely looks like both.

It was mostly about doing those dull jobs nobody likes doing.

Actually getting in touch with someone already doing the work instead of endlessly reading about it online at midnight.

Building one tiny actual side project that nobody asked me to build instead of endlessly talking about "transferable skills" as though they were some abstract concept.

And finally being truthful about what I actually had, rather than swinging between wildly overestimating myself or, much more often, quietly ignoring eight genuine years of experience simply because they happened to be spent wearing a chef's apron instead of an office badge.

The industry stuff catches up.

Much quicker than the anxiety ever allowed me to believe while I was living through it.

The real question was never whether I could learn what a sprint was.

It was whether I could stop apologising for the things I already knew how to do all along.