Location: Yellowstone Room 1, Yellowstone Room 2

With the emergence of new business sectors and continued specialization of technical training, it has become increasingly common that people have to navigate various career options before finding their own “niche”. The traditional recipe of career success - working up a straight career ladder - is becoming a rarity. Securing employment (in both academia and industry) increasingly requires a wide range of skill sets while retaining the ability to show that one is sufficiently specialized for the job at hand. On the other hand, the breadth of career options available today leads to a growing number of applicants with training in more than one area who, just like highly-specialized individuals, might find it hard to market themselves as the ideal fit for a given position. For this panel, we have invited panelists with diverse backgrounds to share their stories of making successful career transitions. We will present examples of rewarding career paths taken by our panelists with ‘non-standard’ backgrounds, and identify some of the resources available to navigate such challenges.