An excellent article on athlete transitions outlining both the challenges and opportunities one may face. Positively, the author states: "one of the things that you will have in spades over your competition is resilience and the understanding that nothing good comes without commitment and hard work".
Athletes entering the workforce face unique challenges. Consider the following on how to maximise your odds of success.
It doesn’t matter what level of athlete you are; if you are planning to enter the ‘everyday workforce’ after retirement, then you are likely not prepared for what’s coming.
Whether you’re an Olympian, a collegiate athlete (like myself), or a state level competitor, the transition from sporting life to professional life is tough. Since making the switch myself almost 10 years ago, athletes have been asking me the same questions:
“How do I get a job without any work experience?”
“How can I land a job at one of the world’s best companies?”
“What can I do to ‘catch up’ to people who haven’t spent most of their lives in a pool, or on a court, bike or field?”
The first problem is that most athletes start asking these questions much later than they should. Waiting until after you retire makes the effort much harder and unfortunately most athletes don’t realise this (I was no different).
Surprisingly, despite the vast number of athletes in the world, there is limited guidance for those hoping to enter the workforce either after university or later in life. There is little information about the mental challenges most athletes face and less on lessons learned from former graduates.
Since there is no ‘Things I wish I knew before I tried to start a career after sport’forum, I thought that I would share some of my experiences in the hope it that might help people face this challenging time, including:
Feelings you might have after retiring from sport and while looking for your first job
Harsh realities about why it’s challenging
Reasons to feel better right now
Shorter term actionable tips to improve your odds of landing your first job
Longer term advice for after you’ve started your professional career
Before we get started, let me provide some brief context:
This past weekend I had two conversations, each with an athlete approaching the end of their sporting careers. One was a Division I collegiate athlete, the other was an Olympic gold medallist. As they looked to the future, each were looking to start afresh in the workforce. They envisaged entering the corporate world in a junior position and relying on grit and hard work to rise through the ranks. However, simply entering was proving to be more confusing, daunting and difficult than either were readily prepared for.
"Facing the real world is a harsh adjustment for any athlete"
For many, life up until retirement revolves around training and competition. You likely recall the dates of past events by determining how they align with career milestones or a particular four-year Olympic cycle. You have dedicated thousands of hours towards a pursuit that yielded many benefits though, unless you are one of a fortunate few, without substantial financial reward. Upon retiring, the source of that accomplishment enters the past and with it goes a large subset of your demonstrable abilities. Your identity, your confidence and even your sense of self-worth can be blindsided. The environment that enabled your success has also changed; your daily routine has been upended, and your support crew – coaches and teammates – are no longer central to your pursuits.
But it’s ok… right? Surely there are scores of recruiters who have been longing for you to retire so they refocus your natural talent and formidable drive to help them in their worthy corporate causes?
Wrong.
While tales of your athletic prowess have filled hours of social conversation, they are only likely to provide enough anecdotes for about two minutes in an interview. Even if you happen to be differentially gifted at conversation, getting that interview (and I mean interview, as opposed to initial conversation) is difficult.
1. Ok, let’s review a few feelings you might have after retiring from sport and while looking for your first job:
A loss of identity: For the longest time, you were always introduced to people as “the runner” or “the rower”. This reputation can be great while competing, but leave a hole after stopping.
Lost, generally: Imagine your life as a roadmap. So far you’ve been on a nice solid highway with clearly defined markers. Let’s call it ‘the highway of clarity and assurance’: In primary school you may have been a good runner. After a few years you went to middle school and won a few races. You then spent a number of years in high school where you started to train more seriously, then perhaps a few more years in college where you became better still. Now you find yourself about a quarter of the way across the map, but the highway you’ve been on has abruptly ended. Instead of a well signed path stretching out before you, the direction of the path ahead is unclear, the ultimate destination is unknown, and there isn’t another milestone as far as you can see: The prospect of getting a job seems new and exciting until you realise that you could be there for the next 20 years.
A little duped: As you look around at your non-athlete peers getting job offers at prestigious companies, you may start to get the sense that they have known something that you didn’t all along. “No one told me that I had to apply for a grad role that far in advance! I was focused on competing and didn’t realise that was how it worked. How do people know about these things?!” While you were improving your technique and endurance, others were working on their recruitment strategy and expanding their marketable skill set. When an athlete pulls up at retirement and starts looking around they could be forgiven for feeling like they may have been investing in the wrong stock.
Feeling all of the above is entirely normal. However, it’s important to stress that these worries are not unfounded; making the transition from sport to work is hard.
"Hard? I LOVE hard. I THRIVE when things are hard!"
...is the battle cry from most athletes. To clarify, I don’t mean ‘great day at the gym’ hard, I mean ‘being strung along in a dysfunctional relationship’ kind of hard. You can't simply muscle through this one. Job hunting with little to no work experience can leave one’s confidence shot, finances stretched, and energy depleted.
2. Let me be direct about a few sobering realities:
The competition is fierce: You want to continue to surround yourself with the best? Top banking and consulting firms screen thousands of well-qualified resumes each year and only around 1% of them will be offered jobs. To emphasise, with over 1500 graduating students from top universities applying to a single firm, only around 15 applicants will be offered a job. These numbers are fairly consistent each year and are in-line with the acceptance rates for top corporations like Google and Facebook. Consider that the majority of those applications come from elite universities, and the application processes are extensive enough to weed out those who aren’t fully committed or think they have limited chance. In other words, around 99% of suitably motivated and roughly qualified candidates don’t get offers.
You’re behind: Unfortunately, as a job seeker you’re now competing against non-athletes who have spent their summers amassing internships and part time roles. Not only do they look better on paper, they quite simply are better, at least at this early stage. Imagine a top track and field sprinter trying to join an elite soccer team. Sure, speed is great for soccer players, but without impressive ball skills she’s going to be quickly overlooked by selectors. While most companies would love to hire someone with impressive talents, the truth is at the beginning these peripheral abilities are simply ‘nice to haves’. What they are looking for is a foundational level of relevant ability – the equivalent of a soccer coach prioritising promising ball skills over a sprinter with none. "But I'm trainable. I'll work hard! Look at my proven ability to overcome adversity" I hear you say. Forget it – they want (nay will be paying for) a return on you ASAP, and while any good company will invest in the development and mentoring of talent, think of them as a soccer coach who wants to invest in players with a strong foundation of ball skills and good speed, rather than someone who can outrun a gazelle but has two left feet.
You’re unlikely to thrive right away: You have spent years getting to where you were in sport. Athletes in this transition frequently say "I know I have to start out at the bottom, and I'm fine with that". Saying this is one thing, but starting again from scratch at anything is something you likely haven’t done for a while, and you’ve forgotten how challenging it can be. Think of the time tennis players have invest in their serve over the years. Not many would enjoy starting from zero again, particularly when their peers can do it easily. You are likely used to being the best performer at ‘your thing’ in any random group. Unfortunately, when starting out in the workplace you should be happy if you’re around the average capability level, which doesn’t sit well with most competitive people.
The above points are unequivocal and should not be trivialised. However, hopefully in some way they are reassuring. Many people are likely telling you not to worry, but sometimes it feels good to have your concerns validated.
3. Having articulated some potential reasons for your anxiety, the following should help give you some immediate comfort:
Re ‘your identity’: Rest assured that you will always be “a runner” or “a rower” if you choose to be. You will associate with those in kind who have gone before you, and you will find kinship with those that come after you. This part of you is not lost – it’s just maturing for use at a different time, in a different way. People will still think well of your impressive athletic feats, however they will be impressed because they discover this about you while seeing you perform at other things.
Re being ‘lost and behind’: Your life is no longer ‘linear’. In time you will realise that this is not as scary as it seems and actually is a blessing. While you’ve been slower to start in business, success isn’t solely determined by your speed out of the blocks. Until now you’ve probably measured yourself against people in ‘your year’ or ‘your class’ or ‘who are the same age as you’, and you panic if you think they might be a few years ahead of you on the corporate ladder. Relax; in 5 years’ time, such comparisons will be meaningless. Some of your peers will have kids, some will have had multiple unrelated jobs, some might win the lottery, and some might be in jail. As Baz Luhrmann said...
"Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, and sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it is only with yourself."
Re ‘feeling duped’: Understandable, but don’t dwell on this. Hopefully your time as an athlete provided you with a number of wonderful opportunities and experiences that you might otherwise not have had. You might have gone to college on scholarship. You might have met your spouse. You might have seen the world. These are all experiences that many others won’t have had. Bank that. There is little more to life than the experiences you remember.
Re ‘the competition is tough’: Sadly, not much to say. It’s simply bloody tough. However, understanding the reality is better than just hoping that everything will work out.
Re ‘you won’t be good right away’: Of course not. You're human.
A few more general points worth mentioning:
You’re not weak or a failure for feeling this way: This is hard – the bad kind of hard. Few do this well, and no one does it easily. Do your best to stay positive.
You’re not alone: Many others are feeling this way right now, and many before you have felt this way in the past. Talk to your sporting colleagues. Talk to alumni. Talk to friends of friends.
There is no ‘perfect path’, so don’t worry about getting it wrong: Pursue opportunities and don’t keep holding out for the ideal solution. Like the time you failed at soccer before making it on the track, you might have to try a few things before getting it right (or ‘right enough’). Your first job, while influential, isn’t the only driving factor of where you will be in 10 years. I recently interviewed a candidate for a graduate level role at Bain who had previously been a lawyer for 3 years at a top law firm. Prior to being a lawyer, she had spent several years practicing as a surgeon. She was offered the job at Bain and will be starting alongside several yet-to-graduate students next year when they enter their first job. For the record, she’s very excited. Remember the non-linear path.
Hopefully you’re feeling a little better. What now?
4. Here are a few actionable tips for the short term while looking for your first professional job:
Know the entry points: Educate yourself on the best points in time to join companies. Many top firms have a specific time of year when they do most of their recruiting, usually over the course of about a week. There are hard deadlines/dates for applications for these jobs. For graduating seniors in US colleges, this is usually as early as the first few weeks of the school year in the fall, however it can be even earlier. It’s also the case that these primary entry points are restricted for current students in their final years, either from undergrad or MBA programs. All other entry points are for experienced hires, and it’s usually harder to break in this way (especially without experience). Don’t wait until you retire before looking for work; dig the well before you are thirsty.
Make a clean break: Ideally, you would land a job while still competing and coincide the starting date with the end of your career. However, if you are like most and have only started really looking since retiring then don’t look for a job until you decide to commit to it wholeheartedly. I’ve seen countless people reduce their training load to ‘sort of’ start a career and years go by quickly without much success. Not only do they not have a new career, but their sporting performance has regressed and their confidence is low. Accept that you will be starting over and take this challenge head on. If you chase two rabbits, both with escape.
Consider returning to study to benefit from a structured recruitment process: As an MBA, about a third of my time was devoted to academics, a third to networking, and a third to job hunting. Even if you already have an advanced degree, it might be worth returning to study just to take advantage of the primary entry points the second time around. At the very least it buys you a bit more 'highway', and helps explain to recruiters how you are developing yourself into a professional beyond sport.
Pursue the familiar: Some of the anxiety about the loss of your identity can be alleviated by seeking opportunities with a familiar brand. Question whether you’ll need to explain to others where you work. Saying ‘Coca-Cola’, ‘Disney’ or ‘PricewaterhouseCoopers’, is more relatable than saying ‘a software company’, or a ‘medical device company’, and may better help define the new you.
‘Stack the deck’ in your favour: The competition is tough, so you need to ensure you find a way to make your other abilities seem both relevant to the job and scarce in the job market. Putting the very best of your intentions aside, what exploitable value can you bring on day 1? Do you speak French or Arabic? Those skills are more valued in Europe than in America, so consider starting your job search there. Do you have a celebrity following in certain markets? Look for jobs where that could be exploitable by employers. Don’t waste any marketable abilities you have (and I’m not talking about your powers of persuasion or charm).
Get your pitch right: ‘Stacking the deck’ will covertly improve your chances, but your pitch should overtly convince recruiters that you are more valuable than other candidates. Why did you relocate to Europe? What makes you interested in this field? Make your story compelling, concise and specific. You want to appear less “I’m ready for anything, put me in coach!”, and more “I feel I can differentially help you with X, while I build capability in Y”. Consider, as an athlete, who would you rather hire to help you perform: a well-intentioned cheerleader, or a focused, trainee masseuse? Get your pitch down to 30 seconds. Practice it with friends and family – the cynical ones will be more helpful.
Seek out a role model: Find someone in your sport who has made the transition successfully. I’m not talking about the NBA MVP who went on to found his own Venture Capital firm, I’m talking a solid athlete who may have made Olympics, but never achieved household notoriety. In other words, someone who had to work their way up from scratch in the workplace; someone more renowned for their professional track record than their sporting history. Find that person, and stay close to them. Even without discussing things with them directly, they will be a powerful source of advice and motivation.
Relax (a little): Similar to you coming to appreciate that there is life beyond competitive sport, you too will come to learn that there’s also more to life than work. At least at first, your job will likely define you less than your time as an athlete did.
5. Finally, when you do land that first role, some advice for the longer term:
Accept that results are no longer as tangible as you might like: Winning and losing are no longer binary. There is no clock to compete against. In sport, you train for a year to shine on one day. You can train hard and fall apart in a race, or occasionally win without having the best preparation. The professional world doesn’t work this way. The highs and lows will be more frequent and less dramatic. Your success will be defined by the journey you take, the character with which you approach it, and by subtle, incremental praise.
Question (and keep questioning) what truly drives you: There is strong chance that whatever you throw yourself into next isn’t going to be as interesting or rewarding as what you were doing before. You likely won’t be a natural standout at it, you might not progress or improve as fast as you might like, and the ‘purpose’ might be less meaningful to you. As a potential banker, consider if you really going to care about the transactions you help facilitate. As a consultant do you really care about helping that company improve their margins? Of course the answer doesn’t have to be yes initially – you’re after experience (and a bit of cash). However, sport is wonderful because the effort and celebration is around something as meaningless as running fast or jumping high. It gives us, and others, pleasure so we don’t question the pursuit. The working world is marred by things like remuneration, politics, subjective performance measurement and plain old boring “normality”. These realities are easier dealt with if you are doing something that you believe in – as you did with sport. Try to follow what your true interests are – not what you think they should be just because a company topped a ‘best place to work’ list, or you’ve heard banking is an elite career.
Commit at least two years to your first job: Having said the above, it doesn’t matter what it is or how much you hate it, stick out your first job for at least two years. This is important for three reasons. Firstly, you will be learning – even if the lesson is how tough the “real world” is. Secondly, no future job description will ask for 9 months of experience; the bare minimum (if any is required), will be at least 2 years of full time experience in something. Finally, and most importantly, less than 2 years is not enough time to demonstrate that your level of commitment is translatable between sport and working life. At best, you will love it. At worst, being there will give you two more years on the highway.
Like many things in sport, making the transition to life after sport is tough but necessary. As an athlete, one of the things that you will have in spades over your competition is resilience and the understanding that nothing good comes without commitment and hard work. Now is the perfect time to back yourself, and dive head first into a new challenge.
Good luck!
Richard is a Manager with Bain & Company, the first company voted as the ‘Best Place to Work’ three times by Glassdoor (2012, 2014 & 2017). He was Captain of the Men’s Swimming and Diving team at the University of Southern California, where he held four university records before retiring following graduation in 2008. He currently lives in Sydney.