Many are in the midst of a career disruption, whether by a layoff, unstable funding, a life event, or a quiet realization that you want something different. You sit down with a journal, talk things over with a friend, browse job ads, ruminate, second guess. You generate ideas for what might come next. All of your ideas have some connection to parts of your past, but they are also quite different from each other. Maybe one potential path is grounded in public service, and another path goes in a seemingly opposite direction of entrepreneurship or corporate roles. Your list might have five or ten possibilities in an unformed, unranked jumble.
You feel briefly energized by possibilities—then uncertain. How do you choose? What’s realistic on your timeline? How do you explain this tangle of ideas to anyone else?
Take heart: you’re not off track. You’re actually starting your career transition in the most useful and most common way. Prof. Herminia Ibarra of the London Business School explains the inevitability and necessity of this approach to career transition in her book Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, based on interviews with hundreds of professionals.
Balancing Reflection and Action
The early stage of a career change is often messy. Your ideas don’t align neatly—they pull in different directions. And the change doesn’t have to be dramatic to feel disorienting. Even relatively small shifts, like taking a similar role in a new industry, or with a bigger or smaller employer, can shake your sense of direction.
This discomfort is normal and a sign you might be on the right track.
Most professionals will encounter a few of these turning points over the course of their working life. If you’re feeling unmoored, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, it means you’re at the beginning of something real.
So how do you move forward?
The key is to balance reflection with action. Thinking alone won’t get you there. You need real-world feedback. This information will help you test and shape your ideas.
Conducting Career Experiments
Thinking alone won’t get you there. You need real-world feedback. This information will help you test and shape your ideas.
As Prof. Ibarra explains in Working Identity, one of the best ways to do this is through “career experiments.”
A career experiment is a small, low-risk action that helps you gather insight about a path you’re considering. It could be:
- A conversation with someone in a role or field you’re curious about
- Attending a workshop, conference, or class
- Researching an organization or job path in more depth, even if they’re not hiring
- Volunteering, freelancing, or shadowing to get a feel for the day-to-day
You don’t need a clear goal yet. You just need clear questions: What am I hoping to learn? What assumptions am I testing? What would help me rule this idea in or out?
Run enough of these experiments, and you’ll start to notice patterns. You’ll feel less stuck. Your next step will be a well-informed move, shaped by lived insight.
It can be tempting to rush to action, to skip experimenting because it can feel uncomfortable to start. Here is what we have seen though. Without this kind of intentional learning and a willingness to be uncomfortable, several things often happen:
- You skip ahead to sending out résumés and taking interviews, but then you feel unexcited or unsure even when interviews or offers come in, or perhaps worse, there are no interviews or offers. Both you and potential employers cannot quickly connect your motivation and fit to the job opportunity.
- You miss the bigger possibility: the job or path you could have pursued, if only you had explored it. A bigger, more intentional change might have better suited your present or future needs in terms of compensation, lifestyle, skills, or other factors.
- You are driven by the need to find work quickly, but you end up squandering your efforts. The reality is very few people have the luxury of long unemployment. But taking the time has dividends. First, spending a lot of time sending out hundreds of resumes without clearly sorting your own interests, experience and skills actually wastes time with limited results. Second, even if you can’t take the time to make the big change at this particular crossroads, even a small, interim step toward that bigger change can put you on a new trajectory. So take the time you can to conduct the experiments that might help.
By contrast, the more you experiment, the more likely it is that your next job will reflect who you are now: your current interests, your growth, and the kind of life you actually want.
So if you’re at a crossroads: don’t rush, and don’t freeze.
Start small. Take steps that help you learn.
Trust that clarity will come not from overthinking, but from doing.
If you need assistance to move from reflection to action, a coach can help with that. Contact us to explore how coaching can help you with your career transition.