The Realities of a Career Transition

If you’ve been thinking of making a career change, you are not alone. Even if you aren’t impacted by mass lay-offs, seeing your existing career go nowhere, would make you consider options that offer you growth, monetary benefits and an opportunity to make an impact. 

However, career transition (which is more than just a job switch) can often be an emotionally fraught process – one that involves confusion, loss, insecurity, and struggle. Big changes can be exhilarating, but they’re also terrifying.

What makes career transitions so difficult? 

Prof. Herminia Ibarra, Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, has been researching career reinvention for more than two decades. 

She highlights the following barriers that make career transitions difficult. 

Not knowing what to do next

Herminia’s research consistently finds that determining next steps is the top barrier people encounter when they consider making a career change. 

When it comes to making big life decisions, we’re typically told that the first step is to get clarity on what we want. Once the hard work of self-reflection is done, the rest is simply a matter of implementation.

In majority of cases, according to Herminia, people know what they don’t want to do anymore, or what is no longer viable, but they don’t know what to do instead. So they delay getting started, feeling that they first need greater clarity or wait until they’ve lost a job and are forced to make a change.

Limiting Mindset

So far all our major career moves were well scripted by communities and professions that oversaw them. There were clear paths to definite end results say, becoming a Doctor or a CEO or an Equity Partner and so on. But today career paths are non-linear and career transitions even more so. Anyone transitioning needs to take the road less travelled with no prescribed path to success. This uncertainty causes anxiety, loss of professional identity, fear of failure and self-blame. Which in turn keeps professionals stuck in a limbo. 

Inadequate Networks

Often professionals have deep ties with people they work with, within and outside their organisations. However, in order to transition, professionals need to explore options outside their current field. Exploring new networks becomes difficult especially when they don’t know what to do next. Without clarity on next steps professionals find it difficult to craft a narrative and clearly position themselves. People worry they won’t know what to say when networking or that they’ll blow a potentially useful contact that they might tap later, when they have more clarity.

Financial Constraints

Financial constraints can make certain options unrealistic, especially for people who support families. Taking time from existing commitments that offer financial security to explore what’s needed to transition can be challenging and at times, inhibiting. 

Lacking the right skills

In today’s day and age every field is rapidly evolving, thanks to technology developments and shifts in what consumers are demanding. Aspiring career changers, especially those with decades of experience behind them fear lacking requisite skills and being perceived as over qualified at the same time. These worries are very real with significant impact on progress towards a new career. 

“Fewer and fewer of us are conceiving of life as having the three ‘traditional’ stages: a short early stage devoted to learning, a long middle stage dedicated to work, and a later stage devoted to enjoying one’s golden years. Instead, with growing frequency, we’re alternating between changing jobs and careers, pursuing opportunities for education, and making time for periods of rest and restoration”. – Herminia Ibarra

What helps?

Experimenting

Career change is iterative. You can’t line everything up in advance. You have to figure things out over time and make adjustments as you go. 

“When you don’t know where to start, just doing anything that is different from what you habitually do can help you get unstuck”, says Herminia. Do some volunteer work, take up freelance advisory, conduct projects in areas of interest. If you have a hunch, explore it, even if provisionally. These actions create ‘habit discontinuity’ and put you in contact with people in new circles. Exploring different options gives you a chance to test your hypothesis about what you like doing, gives you clarity about your strengths and weaknesses and creates a way forward that no amount of introspection would do. 

Herminia sites the case of Sophie, a lawyer. Coming out of a two-decade corporate career, Sophie wasn’t sure what she wanted to do next, but she was keen to explore a range of possibilities, among them documentary filmmaking, non-executive board roles, and sustainability consulting. Over a three-year period she got herself a board-director accreditation, took filmmaking and journalism courses, worked on a start-up idea, did freelance consulting on compliance, joined a non-profit board, did an internship in a newsroom, completed a corporate film project in her old area of ethics and integrity, and produced (and won prizes for) two short films. With deeper insight about the economic realities of the media and entertainment industries, she now feels well placed to decide between putting most of her energy into documentary filmmaking and building a more diverse portfolio of work.

Embracing the Liminal State

Reinventing your career requires you to navigate between a past that is clearly over and a future that’s still uncertain. It can feel like a rollercoaster ride and often unpleasant specially for people who are used to single-mindedly pursuing clear goals on a well-trodden path.

However, this state of liminality is very useful and dare I say necessary. This state gives you time and space to discover what you want to change, identify the habits and assumptions that might be holding you back, and build sufficient skills experience and connections in a new arena.

Ways to make the most out of your liminal state are as follows:

• Diverge and Delay – If you want your liminal period to lead to real discovery, you need to experiment with divergent possibilities while delaying commitment to any one of them. In doing so, you’ll have to think more creatively and will obtain more information about yourself and your options. Just like Sophie, the lawyer in our earlier example. 
• Exploit and Explore – Don’t get stuck in either/ or i.e. either you are using (exploiting) your old skills or you are pivoting (exploring) to something new. Most people making career transition have to do both simultaneously, at least at first — ideally staying in their old jobs and careers while exploiting and exploring on the side until something new becomes viable.

Bridge and Bond

We grow professionally in and through our relationships with others. When it comes to career change, you need to build your relationships in two ways: by bridging, which involves creating or reactivating relationships beyond your current social circle, and bonding, which involves deepening ties and finding community within a close circle of kindred spirits.

Bridging mobilizes your weak ties and maximizes your chances of learning about new opportunities. A recent study of more than 20 million LinkedIn users showed that this is indeed true: weak ties help you get a job because they connect you to farther-flung social circles. The hitch is that most people dread the prospect of reaching out to their extended network in this way because it’s hard work and can leave you feeling exposed and vulnerable. 

That’s why bonding relationships — critical for anyone trying to stay healthy, happy, and sane — are so important for people in transition. They provide the support, sustenance, and space people need to process the unsettling emotions of the transition period. There’s no one way to forge bonding relationships. Sometimes the important ones are with people you already know (especially spouses), but sometimes they are with kindred spirits, people also in transition, or those already working in the field to which you aspire. 

Sophie bonded with the newsroom team (who invited her to stay on a freelance basis after her internship), a community of female documentary filmmakers, and some of the other mature students in her courses.

There’s convincing evidence that 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. We all need a secure base from which to explore the unknown and turn painful feelings into sources of creativity and growth.

Finally, Remember that it’s a “Learning Plot”, not a “Hero’s Journey“

Your story will most likely depart from the timeless myth in which a hero (you!) struggles to pivot to the next career and, by dint of hard work and determination, ultimately finds a happy ending. That kind of simple, linear plotline doesn’t reflect the realities of today’s working world, in which jobs and careers are precarious, liminality can be long, and resolution — if there is any — tends to be short-lived. 

Being in transition is like losing the plot of your professional life. So we all need to get comfortable with a new kind of narrative that revolves around what Herminia calls ‘the learning plot’ — a story of ongoing struggle and adaptation. 

The prize is learning: what you learn about yourself when you embrace, rather than resist, the loss of status and identity will give you access to more options in the long term. Proficiency in being liminal won’t reduce the great uncertainty before you. But it will increase your capacity to successfully navigate the present and future transitions that are the signature of a modern career.

Got a career transition story to tell? Contact us here

Resources to Explore:

• Working Identity | Unconventional Strategies for reinventing your career – By Herminia Ibarra
• Act Like a Leader and Think Like a Leader – By Herminia Ibarra
• Why career transitions are so hard. How to better manage them – By Herminia Ibarra
• Five Barriers to Career Change – and how to overcome them – By Herminia Ibarra, Kendall Smith and Neil Courtis
• The MasterPlan Program by Strategytraining.com