Career transitions can be hard
Career transitions can be hard
Organizations and Jobs are always reshaping.
This is caused by many things. Some of them are:
- The accelerated pace of technological change
- The advent of AI
The frequency and prevalance of career reinventions is growing. Constant career reinvention has become the new normal. So, we need to learn how to get better at making the most of the frequent transitions that will constitute a long working life.
With growing frequency, we are alternating between changing jobs and careers, pursuing opportunities for education, and making time for periods of rest and restoration.
Big changes can be exhilarating, but they’re also terrifying. Career transitions are an emotionally fraught process - one that involves confusion, loss, insecurity, and struggle.
Why change is hard
- a lack of institutional support
- If you wanted to become a doctor, make partner at a law firm, or move up the management ranks, you had to follow a clear sequence of steps.
- an unsettling loss of professional identity
- Our sense of identity is anchored in the well-defined groups and organizations with which we are associated and by which we are recognized.
Usually we fail to change simply because we don’t know how to go about it. The problem lies in our methods, not our minds.
We have to hustle, follow our nose and activate our networks, trying lots of different things, often simultaneously, without fully settling on one. We have to learn and adapt in a world that rewards optionality and the exploration of many possible selves.
A Liminal State
Embracing optionality and multiplicity in the search for a new career, makes a lot of sense intellectually, but emotionally it’s a roller-coaster ride. That’s because it puts you in what anthropologists call a liminal state, where you must navigate between a past that’s clearly over and a future that’s still uncertain.
But when we are changing careers, liminality gives us the necessary time and space to question the old givens. We can let go of our commitment to who we used to be and focus more creatively on who we might become. It takes time to discover what we want to change, identify the habits and assumptions that might be holding us back, and build sufficient skills experience and connections in a new arena. We have to be willing to get and stay lost for a while.
How to make the process easier?
- Diverge and delay.
- Experiment with divergent possibilities while delaying commitment to any one of them. In doing so, we’ll have to think more creatively and obtain more information about ourselves and our options.
- Exploit and explore.
- Either-or thinking is not going to work. We have to be able to do both simultaneously. Start exploring other areas while working a job that you are considering leaving.
- Bridge and bond.
- Create or reactivate relationships beyond our current social circle.
- Deepen ties and find community within a close circle of kindred spirits.
- They provide the support, sustenance, and space people need to process the unsettling emotions of the transition period.
- When independent consultants find their tribe, they are not only more productive but also better able to tolerate the anxiety of being on their own.
- One way or another, we all need a secure base from which to explore the unknown and turn painful feelings into sources of creativity and growth.
Self-reflecting out loud
- Engage with others and tell them your story—again and again, as much to make sense of your experience as to enlist their help.
- Others will respond, sympathize, commiserate, ask questions, call your bluffs, and share their own experiences in ways that will help clarify your thinking.
Book recommendations
- Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra
Reading material
Look at these articles: