How I avoid career dead ends
Job roles and titles are not created equal unfortunately. If you are given an unfavorable one even once, it could lead you down a career dead end, that cripples your potential.
Maximize choice
You always want there to be a large amount of job opportunities relevant to you, with a high level of variance. That means that if you want to switch your specialization, or do a bit more people management, or do the same work for a different industry, you could make that switch easily, without a demotion in between.
The biggest red flag detectors
is it generic or specific in terms of skills (Rails dev vs full stack software engineer)
is it generic or specific in terms of industry / segment / subject matter (ecommerce dev, scrum master, automotive xyz)
is it in English or in the local language (English preferred, even if there is a language requirement later)
could you explain it to your grandma (if she understands what you currently do, so will everyone involved in the recruiting process)
When you turn it around, this is what you get:
broad responsibilities
broad skillset
clear, universally understood job title
Nice generic jobs, that everyone understands, which give you huge amount of choice. That's the sweet spot.
If your current job title sucks
When the only problem is the title, it's acceptable to adjust your LinkedIn to your needs.
Maybe put the official title in brackets on the CV, so if you are a RoR developer officially, but you actually do React, JS, Rails, Java, Docker, MongoDB - just call yourself a full stack engineer.
Even the overlord of tech recruiting Gergely Orosz wrote something along those lines in this ebook.
Sometimes this is just cosmetics, but sometimes this is an exercise, which can help you figure out what role you are aiming for, so you can mold the current job into that.
I've realized that quite often, you have a lot of control over what you do once you are hired, so it's nothing audacious to adjust your role towards the one you want.
An innovation officer might turn into an agile coach, or a reporting analyst will be a BI developer. Same job for the most part, but with a big leap in salary and amount of job opportunities.
What I did with my confusing title
I had a job title which was making it harder to get hired. I was called a Director, which sounds fancy, because in product companies, Director means responsible for 50+ people. I was a Team Lead / Engineering Manager in reality.
My role was 0-90% hands-on, depending on who you asked, rest was various management stuff.
After a couple of months, I acted as a senior engineer / tech lead with a few management duties, focused on hands-on work, because those achievements would be important to get myself hired again.
In the meantime, I also applied to Engineering Manager roles, because that role can also range from pure management to senior engineer who manages some people, too.
You'd be surprised how often you can walk the line between roles without noticing, which comes in very handy when it's time to write CVs.
A year later I was out, back to a beautiful generic role, which won't turn into a dead end.
If I didn't pay attention, I would have been promoted and gotten stuck in general management role, which I wanted to avoid at all cost. It could have the death of my software engineering and technical management career.
Important side note
You can do the same job, but earn a lot less and be in a much more conservative environment, because one is a product company and the other isn't.
Product companies, as in, usually VC funded, are focused on growth over efficiency.
That translates to a very different mindset. If you keep counting pennies, and worrying about ROI of every bit you spend, you won't end up with the best tools, or attract people who want to flex their creative muscle to build the best products. But I digress.
Job titles that are common in product companies have also found their way into all fortune 500 companies, so most likely, you have identical titles already.
If however, you have very different titles at your company, it's probably a good idea to find the role you want in the product world, and start aligning yourself towards it. You are preparing yourself for that job, while also making the recruiters' job easier by highlighting your overlapping experience.
Think about the recruiters
After referrals, recruiters are usually your best chance at making less obvious transitions in your career. They can enable you to get a chance, which is often all it takes. That being said, don't make it harder for them than it has to be.
Understand the roles you are interested in and write CVs (yes, multiple versions based on the role) tailored to make your case for that role. If you feel that your CV could use some work, I can recommend this guide. It definitely helped me during my last job hunt.
Learn to explain your current and past roles in plain English. Hiring managers will try to assess which areas of the role you are already confident in, and where you will need some help. If they don't understand what you do now, they can just guess, which usually doesn't work in your favor, unless they are very desperate to hire. I find this especially important when you are coming from a corporate environment, with its own jargon.
And last, but not least, have a chat with some friendly recruiters. A good recruiter can be an incredible resource to understand roles, companies and hiring processes.