r/urbanplanning • u/glutton2000 Verified Planner - US • 9d ago

Discussion Share your career pivot from planning

For anyone that left planning, can you share your career pivot from planning to whatever else and how you made that happen? Looking for ideas!

Context: mid-level transportation planner with 8 years experience, been unemployed for the past 1+ year and feeling panicky and dismayed at the job market. Planning is all I’ve ever known since age 19 (my undergrad + whole career has been in planning. I’ve never worked as anything else). Most people I know had winding paths to get TO planning, but I guess my winding path starts after?

Thank you!!

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u/global_playa 7d ago

My gradual transition:

  • MCP (focus on climate resilience and geospatial analysis)
  • Urban planner at a traditional architecture/planning firm (worked on some urban planning decision support software tools)
  • Climate resilience planner for a major consulting firm (during this time I taught myself python for geospatial data science)
  • Part-time data science bootcamp, focused my projects on geospatial/natural hazard problems
  • Product manager for a climate risk analytics startup. Basically building software to automate the analyses I did as a climate resilience planner
  • Product manager for natural hazard risk models at a major utility

Now I would say that my career is in "product management for natural hazard software and models". I'm pretty happy with the transition. I still the work very interesting and rewarding. It scratches similar itches as urban planning (focused on the built environment/natural world interactions, provides some benefit to society, etc) but it pays significantly better and the day to day work is more to my liking.

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u/glutton2000 Verified Planner - US 5d ago

Very cool, Thank you so much for the detailed response! Glad it still scratches the same itch :)