Changing industry at executive level

What actually transfers

Functional depth usually transfers. Judgement under pressure transfers. Knowledge of a particular market, its regulators, its customers and its cost structure often does not, and that is the part a hiring board worries about — reasonably, because getting it wrong at this level is expensive.

So the work of a sector move is not persuading anyone that you are capable. It is making the transfer concrete enough that nobody has to take it on faith.

Three things that make a move credible

Nobody hires a sector change on potential at this level. They hire it because a person they trust said it would work.

Which moves are easiest

• Into a sector that is being reshaped by something you have already lived through. Disruption creates demand for outside experience.
• Into a company where the function is the problem — a finance function to rebuild, an operation to industrialise — rather than one where the sector is the problem.
• Adjacent first. Two moves of moderate distance are usually easier than one long jump, and each one makes the next more credible.
• Where you already know someone. This is not a separate factor; it is the factor.

The honest limit

Some sectors genuinely will not hire outside their own, and no framing changes that. Find out early, from someone inside, rather than discovering it across six months of silent processes.