A good starting point might be to think of all the clients you’ve worked with over those five years. There must have been many occasions when you worked on teams alongside client staff? What did those people do? Which parts of the organisation did they work for? Were they from line departments or internal change management departments? Did they have a static job or were they a pooled resource (like internal consultants). However, don’t just consider ex-clients – all their competitors will have similar set-ups..Many large organisations have their own internal OD and Change staff and allocate them on a project basis. If the organisation is large enough, you may even find that divisions or even functions have their own pool (e.g. I mainly work in banking and most large retail banks have their own change management function with IT, within Credit, within Operations, etc, in addition to a corporate pool, often called something like Change Management Services)Before making the jump, I suggest you get to the very nub of why you want to move? If you dislike the “project” world then moving to an internal pool position would not address your issues - you would need a proper line management job. If you are fed up with travel or culture but still like projects, then an internal OD/CM position could be ideal.Another tack might be to focus away from OD and CM itself and instead leverage any experience that was common across some or all of your projects during your five years. For example if you worked on three projects all in (just an example!) teleco customer services functions, then you may find you know enough about teleco operations to apply for a line management job in that area – even if there is no OD/CM aspect to the position.Five years experience is a good time to consider what you really want to do. Leave it any longer and you may find yourself earning too much as a proven specialist to be able to afford a “backwards to go forwards” step. Believe me, it gets more painful the longer you leave it…..Good luck
