When is a career change not a career change?

Career change can be daunting, often conjuring up a fear of the unknown.  Whether it’s a total 360 degree pivot or more of a slight shift in direction; whether it’s by choice, at a time of someone’s choosing, or involuntary due to factors more outside of someone’s control; part of our ambition with Phoenix’s Careers can change campaign is to help people see that careers can change in many different ways.   

From technological change, to budget cuts and corporate restructuring, I am struck by Herminia Ibarra’s recognition that these days people need almost ‘constant career reinvention’.  Alongside OECD research which found a positive correlation between mid-career mobility and later-life labour market participation, it’s interesting to understand what people, particularly those in midlife, actually view as a career change.   

Definitions of career change

Working with Public First, we looked at people’s understanding of career change, amongst non-retired, 40-65 year olds, and found that:

• Total reinvention: 92% said that they would call ‘when someone moves to a new job, with a new employer, and performs different tasks within a different industry’ a career change.
• Functional shift: Yet if someone makes all of these changes, new job, new employer, different tasks, but stays in the same industry only 42% said they would call that a career change. Over half (53%) said they would not call that a career change.
• Internal shift: Furthermore, only 38% would call ‘a change of role and team but staying with their current employer’ a career change.

It highlights a relatively narrow view of what constitutes a career change, and an opportunity to expand and better define the different options people can explore.  For larger employers in particular, it presents an opportunity to improve retention by helping colleagues identify different, possible, internal moves.

Expanding possibilities

I have seen first-hand how the language of Squiggly Careers resonates with lots of people, giving them a way of describing their career experiences and aspirations, outside of the traditional career ladder.  Phoenix Insights research, conducted by Message House, has also helped us explore different perspectives of how people view their careers:

• 62% of people found the metaphor of their career being a like a road trip appealing – that work today is less about following a fixed course from A to B, and more about the journey, that you can explore new areas and follow new routes as opportunities arise.
• Compared to 49% who found the metaphor of their career being like a ladder appealing – that work today is like a ladder, that you build up a successfully working life by slowly but steadily climbing up the ladder, choosing a company, a trade or a profession, starting at the bottom and by working hard getting promoted.

Whilst language alone will not eliminate the fear of the unknown inherent in making career changes, it can give people frameworks and structure for exploring their options, and help equip them to talk about this with others. 

What definitions do you find helpful?

So how do we acquire and share a better vocabulary for career changes?  I’d like to credit Careershifters, and the work of Dave Evans at Stanford, for some borrowed inspiration on the terminology above of internal shifts and functional shifts, alongside reinvention.  What definitions and frameworks do you use, and how can we make them better understood?

*Cath Sermon is Head of Public Engagement & Campaigns at Phoenix Group. This article was republished from the Phoenix Group website and was first published here.

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