Are you thinking about or perhaps you’ve even taken some steps to change careers? If so, you’re not alone. It’s estimated that less than ½ of us truly enjoy our jobs. A full-time career typically demands 2000+ hours from your life every year. It totally makes sense that you would want to spend that time more wisely.
Urge To Change Careers
There are many reasons for wanting to make a career change. The most common reasons that influence my clients are external events, such as:
- Graduating
- Getting married
- Re-entering the workforce after a long period of caregiving
- Preparing for empty nest
- Getting divorced
- Losing a job
Internal urges can also influence decisions to change a career path as well. Sometimes we simply have a “calling” to a new occupation. Gregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and following an authentic Life, says that being “called” is to be summoned away from your daily grind into “a new level of awareness.”
Of course, internal urges tend to have a more subtle influence on us than external events. External events sometimes force us into a path of change, whereas listening to and acting upon an internal urge or “calling” is solely up to us. However, sometimes we must act on a calling because it keeps nagging us and won’t go away even when we try to ignore it.
Callings keep surfacing until we deal with them. They return, in Freud’s words, as ‘repetition compulsions’…
– Gregg Levoy
3 Phases
When making a major career shift, more than 60% of the effort involves self-assessing and research. For most people, this is the hardest part because it’s more about thinking and less about action. Understandably, when we’re ready for a change, we’d like to have instant answers, clear action steps, and fast results. It can be hard to accept the reality that a career change might take longer than expected or that taking a personality assessment or reading a career book won’t always immediately give us what we need.
But just like in attempting to achieve any massive goal, it’s smart to make a plan, and it’s easier when you can break things into smaller, bite-sized chunks. The good news is that you can do this with a career change too. In fact, there are three major phases in the career change process, and in each one, you can make and follow a plan:
- Phase 1 – Self Assessment Plan
- Phase 2 – Market/Role Fit Assessment Plan
- Phase 3 – Gap Analysis and Career Transition Plan
So, in the first phase, you’re doing self assessment or what I sometimes refer to as your “internal research.” One of the things you might do during this phase is take assessments, such as the one that comes with the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 or the CliftonStrengths online version. Alternatively, you might read how your Myers-Briggs personality type can help determine career choice in the book, Do What You Are. You might do exercises and answer self-reflective questions like you’ll find in classic career exploration books such as, What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles, Is Your Genius At Work? by Dick Richards, and Zen and the Art of Making a Living by Laurence Bolt.
In the second phase, you’re exploring possible matches for industries/segments, as well as potential roles in those industries/segments. This is what I like to call your “external research” plan, and it may involve online research, informational interviewing, and perhaps a few other creative research methods.
After identifying what you want to pursue (even if you’re still not 100% sure it’s only one path that you want to pursue), then it’s time to do a Gap Analysis. Based on the Gap Analysis, you can either create a career transition plan to close the gap or create a career transition plan that requires repositioning or creatively messaging your current skills/qualifications. Sometimes the Gap Analysis helps you narrow down options too.
Take The First Step
Of course, it’s one thing to hear a calling. It’s quite another to act on a calling. If you’re feeling resistance, that’s normal. Just keep in mind that all it takes is one small, first step to start moving forward. Maybe you’ve heard the Chinese proverb about how even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You can sit still wondering about making a career change all you want, but you have to actually take that first step in order to make it happen. Follow the urge, take the first step, and see where your career journey takes you.
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
– Joseph Campbell
– Joseph Campbell