He Had Never Worked on a Private Sector Project... He Got the Job Anyway.
You've spent your whole career on public sector work. Schools, healthcare, and local authority frameworks.
You're good at it.
But every private sector role you look at asks for commercial, resi or hospitality experience, and you don't have a single project you can point to.
So you don't apply. Or you do, and you hear nothing?
We placed a candidate recently who was in exactly that position. Purely public sector, education projects almost exclusively. Schools, from start to finish, for years. Solid delivery record, well liked, no gaps in his CV. He wanted to move into private sector consultancy work and had convinced himself the door was closed.
It got more complicated than that.
He was also being lined up for a step-up at his current firm. On paper that looks like good news. In practice it was about to make the move much harder, because the more senior you get inside one sector, the more the market expects you to have the matching sector experience at that level. A mid-level PM with only public sector work behind him is a coachable hire. A senior PM with only public sector work behind him starts to look like a specialist, and specialists get pigeonholed.
He got the private sector job. Not by waiting for the right advert, and not by pretending to have experience he didn't have.
Here's what actually happened.
Most of the consultancies we work with are in the private sector, delivering commercial, hospitality, retail, and residential. If you filter those firms by "must have delivered a private sector scheme", this candidate never appears. But firms are not identical, and the requirements written on a job spec are not always the requirements in the hiring manager's head. Some firms genuinely need someone who can hit the ground running on a fit-out next Monday. Others are building a team and care far more about attitude, work rate, and whether the person will actually learn.
We matched him to the second kind. A private sector-only consultancy that has consistently hired hard workers and taught them the sector. His personality and his work ethic were the reason he got through the door, not his project list.
That is the part most people miss. They read a job spec as a set of locked gates when a lot of it is a wish list. It is genuinely harder without the right experience, and we won't pretend otherwise. You will be up against people who have the exact background, and sometimes they will win. But harder is not the same as closed.
So what do you do if you're in that position?
First, be honest about the seniority trap. If you are considering a step up within your current sector and you eventually want out of that sector, understand the trade-off you are making. The promotion is not free. Every year at a more senior grade in one specialism makes the sideways move more expensive. That does not mean turn it down. It means making the decision with your eyes open rather than drifting into it.
Second, build a reputation that travels. The thing that moved the needle for this candidate was not a certificate. It was that the people who had worked with him would vouch for him without hesitating. Recommendations, references, and the way you are spoken about when you are not in the room are portable in a way that sector experience is not. Be the person others put their name to.
Third, stop self-selecting out. He nearly did not go for it because he did not match the spec. If he had screened himself out, the conversation would never happen and the placement would never happen.
Apply for the thing you are not quite ready for. Let the hiring manager say no.
Do not do their job for them.
Fourth, use someone who knows which firms actually flex. This is the bit you cannot easily do alone. From the outside, twenty consultancies all look like they want the same thing. From the inside, you know which three of them have hired outside their sector before and been glad they did. That knowledge is the difference between a rejection and an interview.
The right mindset does not replace the right experience, but it goes a lot further than people think. Work hard, be someone people recommend, and stay open to the route you had not planned.
If you're stuck in one sector and want to know which firms would genuinely consider you, send your CV to Huntsman Consult.
We'll tell you honestly what's realistic and where to aim.
Get in touch with James Waissel
👉 https://qrplanet.com/jameswaissel
📞 07554 884592
✉ james@huntsmanconsult.com