How to Go From ‘Accomplished Athlete’ to ‘Promising Professional’

The following comes to us from former USC captain Richard Gosper, and is a shortened version of another piece he wrote on LinkedIn. You can check out the full piece by following this link.

LIFE AFTER SPORT: How to go from ‘accomplished athlete’ to ‘promising professional’

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?”

Unfortunately, most athletes ask these questions later than they should (I was no different).

For most athletes, 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 driver of those accomplishments 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 likely to only provide enough anecdotes for about two minutes in an interview. Even if you happen to be differentially gifted at conversation, getting that interview, and subsequent job offer, 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. Job hunting with little to no work experience can leave one’s confidence shot, finances stretched, and energy depleted.

Fortunately, many people have gone through this, and the learnings are quite consistent for everyone. Since there was no ‘Things I wish I knew before I tried to start a career after sport’ forum when I made the transition, I thought I would share some of my experiences, and advice on how to succeed, in the hope it might help current athletes successfully tackle this challenging time.

1. 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 swimmer”. This reputation can be great while competing, but leave a hole after stopping.
• Lost, generally: Imagine your life as a roadmap. From primary school through college, you’ve been on a highway with clearly defined markers. 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 thought of getting a job can be scary when you realise that you could be there for the next 20 years.
• A little duped: As you look around at your 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 an internship 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, before we get to solutions, it’s appropriate to impart a bit of tough love:

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. These numbers are fairly consistent each year, and 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.
• 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.

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 swimmer” if you choose to be. 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’, following a pre-determined highway. You must now forge your own path. While you’ve been slower to start a career, much like a race, success isn’t solely determined by your speed out of the blocks. Until now you’ve probably measured yourself against people in ‘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’: 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.

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. 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 and will be starting alongside several yet-to-graduate students next year when they enter their first ever 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: Many top firms have a specific time of year when they do most of their recruiting; over the course of about a week. There are hard deadline drops 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 further in advance. 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.
• ‘Stack the deck’ in your favour: The competition is tough, so you need to 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 join the dots and convince recruiters why you are valuable. 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 someone who is more renowned for their professional track record than their sporting history. Find that person, and stay close to them; 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 won’t be as tangible: Winning and losing are no longer binary. There is no clock to compete against. There are no medals. 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 reward.
• Question (and keep questioning) what truly drives you: There is a strong chance that whatever you throw yourself into next isn’t going to be as interesting or rewarding as what you were doing before. 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 more easily dealt with if you are doing something that you believe in – as you did with sport. Try to follow your true interests, 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 early morning practice, 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.