How To Avoid Shifting Into Another Career You Hate

Scared of making the wrong move and winding up in yet another soul-sucking career? Shifting is always risky, but there is a way to test drive your career ideas before you make your final choice. 

You lick the envelope, and fold down the flap. Rub your thumb across the back to seal it. Stand up. 

Your eyes wander across the room to your manager, who’s chatting to one of your colleagues about a big upcoming project. 

Look at the envelope. Look at your manager. Look at the envelope…

Everything you’ve worked so hard for – your identity, your reputation, your livelihood, your financial security – it’s all culminated in this moment.

You’ve been thinking about changing career for a while. You’re not the kind of person to ignore that instinct. You want a career and a life you love.

And now is the moment. There’s a knot in your stomach, and you feel your blood buzzing through your veins…

Three months later… 

You reach out your arm and switch off your alarm clock. Tuesday morning. Time to go to work. And there it is, that familiar feeling of rising dread. All you want to do is turn over and go back to sleep. This is the second time in two weeks you’ve almost wished you had a cold, so you could call in sick.

You thought this new career would be right for you. You’ve never been so wrong.

Can you imagine?

At our online workshops, “jumping out of the frying pan and straight into the fire” is one of the most common fears our career-changers say they’re concerned about: leaving their current career for something they thought was their ideal work, only to discover it’s not right for them.

All that effort and energy, wasted.

It’s terrifying.

And it’s one of the biggest factors that keeps career-changers stuck in work that makes them miserable. 

Uncertainty and inertia are the biggest sticking points of any career change, and oddly enough, they’re a lot like onions. It seems as though as soon as you peel off one layer of “I don’t know”, there you are, looking at another, trying your damn hardest not to cry.

First, there’s the uncertainty that comes with having no idea what you want to do. All you want is to have some inkling of what would really, truly make you happy. And then you have a great idea, and for a short while your brain is buzzing with excitement and inspiration… until you hit the next pungent, acidic layer of uncertainty: the question: “But how can I be sure?”

There is no such thing as absolute certainty. But there are ways to get close.

At Careershifters, we work with clients using our Lean Career Change approach to shifting: running small, low-risk experiments to test out your ideas and discover answers to the three key questions:

• Do I love this?
• Am I any good at it?
• Is it financially sustainable?

Once you’ve got a handle on the Lean Career Change method, it’s time to start designing your first Shift Project, and this can be the point at which people get stuck (and the second career-change nemesis, inertia, can often creep in).

The key to great Shift Projects is to do them fast, and to do them often.

So where do you start?

There are three key questions to ask yourself to start sparking ideas for your first Shift Project

1. Who is already doing what I want to do?
2. Where might they hang out?
3. What do they do?

The first question sounds simple enough, and there’s also huge scope for casting a wide net.

Let’s imagine you’re interested in horticulture.

You’ll start by making a list of every kind of person you can think of who would be even remotely connected to horticulture – including both categories of people, and people you already know.

Your list might look like this:

• Florists
• Landscape gardeners
• Gardeners
• Garden designers
• People who work at the Chelsea Flower Show
• Arborists 
• Tree surgeons
• Permaculturists and vegetable growers
• Farmers
• Garden centre buyers
• Nursery owners
• Allotment owners
• Lecturers and teachers of horticulture
• Uncle Raymond
• My sister-in-law’s father
• Jane

From this list, you can move onto the second question: where might these people hang out?

Florists, for example, might hang out in their flower shops. They might also be found at industry events, wedding fairs, and the flower market where they buy their stock.

Permaculture enthusiasts might have a Meetup group in your area.

Your uncle Raymond might hang out at Uncle Raymond’s house.

Finally, you can address the final question: what do these people do?

See how much detail you can come up with about how these people spend their time.

What’s at the core of their work? What books do they read? What do they do on a day-to-day basis? What are the unusual or unexpected elements of how they spend their time?

At first, to answer these questions, you’ll be drawing on your imagination and whatever you already know about the industry (which may be very little).

What you’re aiming to do by running Shift Projects is to bypass your perception of the industry or field of interest, and start to understand the reality of your career idea.

Our perspectives on career ideas are, inevitably, deeply limited. 

Often, we have an idea of what a role or activity might involve, but no way of knowing if it’s actually accurate. To discover the truth about what we’re considering, it’s necessary to do whatever you can to get as close as possible to your idea – through conversations and through action.

Luckily, the lists you’ve just made can serve as the launchpads for your Shift Projects in exactly that way.

Your first list becomes a list of people to reach out to and connect with. 

You may already know some of the people on it.

Give them a call or meet up for a coffee, and get curious. What do they know about the industry? What’s it really like to do what they do? What do they like about it? What do they hate about it? What do they love about it? What’s the best piece of advice they have for you, given that you’re considering a shift into the field? 

As a Shift Project, these kinds of curious, unbiased conversations will help you begin to  understand whether or not your career idea is actually something you’d be interested in pursuing further. They won’t get you the whole way to certainty, but they will start the ball rolling. You’ll begin to get a twinkle of the answers to the three questions at the core of the Lean Career Change:

Do I love it?
Am I any good at it?
Will people pay me to do it?

As for the people you don’t know, track them down and reach out to them. Your first level of connections (the people you already know) will probably be able to help you with this. And if you want to go further, start thinking about your second list: the places these people might hang out.

Your second list becomes a list of places to go and visit.

You’re looking for places that will give you the chance to be around people who work in your chosen industry, and preferably where they’re up to something related to their work.

Attending an industry event, for example, is a great early Shift Project. You’ll have the chance to connect with people who share your interest and passion, and to experience something of the reality of working in that field. 

You might also drop in on the offices of a company that inspires you, and spend an hour or so observing what goes on.

Your final list becomes a list of actions to experiment with.

The key to this part of the process is to focus on two things:

1. Get close to the action – your focus should be on replicating as closely as possible the reality of working in that industry
2. If you have a choice between doing something alone, and doing something that involves other people, go with the latter. People will form the bedrock of your experiences (and can open doors for you further down the line if the experiment goes well).

Using our horticulture example, your choice of action can be informed by your first two lists. Choose one of your categories of person (horticulture lecturers, for example), and reach out, asking to spend time with them at one of the places you’ve listed in your second list. Alternatively, offer them value in return for your experience. Reach out to a nursery owner and offer an afternoon of your time and labour in return for the experience of seeing ‘behind the scenes’ at their place of work.

Interested in becoming a coach? Coach a friend on a challenge they’re dealing with for an hour.

Graphic design appealing to you? Find a friend who needs some work done, and offer to do it for free for them. Alternatively, ask someone you know to make up an imaginary client with an imaginary brief and fulfil it to a deadline. 

Attend a short course or workshop in the field you’re interested in.

Keep in mind at all times that your Shift Projects need to be fast and frequent. 

The point is not to design the ‘perfect project’, but to stay consistently in a state of play, curiosity, action and experimentation.

The more you do, the more you learn. The more involved you get, the more you become an insider in your chosen field. The more people you connect with, the more chance there is that one of them might open a door for you.

When you stand up from your desk on that Friday afternoon, envelope in hand, looking across the room at your boss, you want to be as close as possible to certain that you’re leaving for something worthwhile. 

Every Shift Project you run pushes that fire further and further from the frying pan.

Some will undoubtedly be duds and dead ends. Some will surprise you: perhaps you really expected to love something, and realise through experience that it’s not for you. And yet, every dead end is a gift – a sigh of relief that you’re not going to end up making the same mistake again.

Post by Natasha (Head of Content for Careershifters)

How To Change Career When You Have No Idea What You're Doing

Stuck in a job that isn’t you? No idea what else you could do, or where to start? Drawing on his own story, following the conventional career rules, you’re going to radically increase the chances of you finding something you love.

It was one of the most difficult periods of my life.

On the surface, I had a great job in a well-known company. I’d done what was expected of me post university. I’d been promoted several times. I had a mortgage, I was travelling with work and had great prospects ahead of me.

Inside though, I was deeply unfulfilled. I wasn’t enjoying my work, I felt like I wasn’t using my full potential, and I longed to wake up feeling like my work was making a difference – to someone or something. 

Yet, I didn’t have a clue what else I could do, and I’d struggled on and off for years to figure out a way to change (making, it seemed to me, every career change mistake there was to make), but without making progress.

Eventually, as you’ll read below, I came out the other side. But it wasn’t an easy journey.

These are the lessons I learnt along the way.

What you need to know

If you’re stuck in your career change, there are three main challenges – or paradoxes – that you’re going to come up against.

1. It’s you that wants to make a change, but it’s also you that’s your biggest obstacle

In the depths of my despair about my job, there were signals from all around me that I wasn’t in the right place: I was embarrassed to talk about my work with others at parties; I couldn’t imagine doing my boss’s job (nor the one her boss had); and I was petrified that I’d reach 60 or 70 and not feel proud of the work I’d done in my life. 

On a day-to-day basis, I just felt numb: uninspired by the meaningless work I was doing, and seemingly stuck in a Groundhog-Day-reality of waking up to the same story every morning.

Yet, at the the same time, I had no idea what else I wanted to do (or if I did have wild ideas, I had no sense of whether they were feasible). I had no idea where to start or how to go about the career change process. I was also scared of taking a cut in salary; scared of what my family and friends would think, and scared of losing the status I’d worked so hard to achieve. 

Ultimately it was me – my fears and my lack of knowledge – that was my biggest obstacle.

I’d wager you’re in a similar position.

2. You can’t figure it out by figuring it out

Like I was, you're probably a knowledge worker: paid to think, to solve problems, and to interact with others. 

Why then, have you not been able to figure what else you want to do?

In the depths of my career change journey, I used to come home from work, wrap myself in my duvet, and go round and round in circles in my head analysing what else could I do. 

My colleague Natasha describes this as her ‘midnight crazy thought loops’ – sitting bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night trying figure out what she could do next. 

Neither of us came up with answers.

The simple reality is that if the solution to your career change lay in more analysis – in making more lists, reading more books, taking more psychometric tests, or simply figuring it all out in your head – you’d have found it by now.

3. You won’t find a job by looking for one

When I started to look for something different, recruitment consultants were my natural first port of call. 

They talked excitedly to me about roles with competitors or other positions in smaller organisations. But it all just left me cold. It was more of the same. I wanted to do something radically different. They couldn’t help.

You may have sent off your CV / resume for jobs in different fields, thinking at least you might get an initial interview. But nothing. You may have spent hours on job sites and just made yourself more miserable by seeing again and again that you don’t have the experience or skills that are being asked for. Or you may have had similar experiences to mine with recruitment consultants.

These are all functions of conventional job market mechanisms not being designed for career changers.

Through no fault of your own, you’re simply not going to stack up against other people with experience and skills in the different field you’re interested in.

What you need to do

There’s a solution to each paradox, but it’s often not what we think it might be.

1. Do it with others, not alone

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller.

You can change careers by yourself, but you’re going to make it a lot easier and a lot less stressful by doing it with others. 

The biggest challenge I faced in my career change was inertia. I wanted to change, but I didn’t want to risk the security of the job I had. I was comfortably uncomfortable.

I would have bursts of energy to do something about my career, followed by periods where I’d get swept back into ‘life’, surfacing weeks or months later and realising nothing had changed.

I only really started to make progress when I deliberately put others around me: I started seeking out others in my company who also wanted to escape; I got a coach; and I started to meet and hang out with different types of people (one of which was to end up leading me to a job I loved – see more below). The net effect was that the others brought different ideas, different connections, and accountability, which finally meant forward movement.

Think of your career change as an expedition, not a day-trip.

If you were climbing to the base camp of Mount Everest, it’s possible you could do it by yourself, but it’s highly likely you’d want to go with others – peers, a guide, a support team. It makes the journey safer, faster and, heck, a lot more fun.

2. Act it out, don’t figure it out

“Ideas occur when dissimilar universes collide.” – Seth Godin.

In my career change journey, it took me four and a half years to get out of a career that wasn’t right for me. 

For most of that time, I was trapped in analysis paralysis.

As the coach who I worked with at the time said, “Richard, it’s like you’re standing in a forest and you have a number of tracks in front of you. But you’re paralysed because you don’t want to make a mistake. And the challenge is: if you don’t take any of the paths, you’re never going to get out of the forest. If you take one of them, it may not be the right track initially, but you can course-correct.”

When I started to act rather than analyse, things started to change.

I did a part-time journalism course. I loved it, but it wasn’t for me as a career. I shadowed my friend who worked in PR for half a day. I did the same with a friend who worked as a Japanese yen bond trader in an investment bank. Fascinating as it was to get a glimpse into these different worlds, neither appealed. 

But notice what I was doing. As Seth Godin talks about, I was stepping into different worlds – sparking ideas and, at the same time, crossing off possibilities, rather than leaving them as open questions in my mind. I was also testing ideas in a way that meant that I didn’t need to leave my day job before I’d figured out what I really wanted to do.

Finally, thanks to an introduction made by my future sister-in-law, I walked into the offices of a social start-up – and I knew in a matter of minutes I’d found something that was totally me.

Had I just seen the organisation’s website or a job ad in a newspaper, I might never have discovered the connection I had with them. But it was made real by meeting the team, sensing the environment and getting a feel for the energy of the place.

In short, action precedes clarity, not the other way round.

3. Look for people, not for jobs

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Job sites, recruitment consultants, CVs / resumes and Google all have their uses in your career change. But they’re not the place to start.

Focus instead on connecting with people.

The power of being in front of people is that you can present the whole you – something a CV or resume simply can’t do.

I wasn’t ‘qualified’ to work in the social startup I fell in love with. But what I did have was a ton of enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. That was never going to come across on my CV or resume.

I didn’t get the job there through a formal application. I got it because I built relationships with people in the organisation. I did some pro-bono work, which led to consultancy work, which led to an interview for a full-time job.

Oh, and if you’re curious to know, I had the worst interview of my life for that role. I so wanted the job that my brain froze, I stumbled my way through the questions, and I left thinking I’d blown it. Catastrophic. Or it might had been, had that been my first interaction with the team. But it wasn’t and, because of the strengths of the relationships I’d built, I still got the job.

Remember: people first, jobs second.

What next

"To know and not to do is not yet to know." – Buddhist proverb.

Making a big career change isn’t easy – otherwise everyone would be doing it. But it is possible. There are hundreds of stories here in our success stories section and elsewhere that show it is.

And remember, this isn’t just about your career; it’s about your life. 

It’s about how you feel every morning; it’s about how that rubs off on your health and your relationships; and, ultimately, it’s about the impact that you can make on the world through being alive in what you do. 

The stakes are high, but they’re higher if you don’t do anything about it.

So, for goodness sake, don’t just read this article. Do something because of it. Please.

And let me know how you get on.

-Post by Richard (Founder of Careershifters)