Variations on the Theme

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 2:10 am

Throughout this book, we have looked for commonalities in the process and practice of working identity. Before we extract some general guidelines about getting started, a few words are in order about how different groups of people might experience career reinvention differently. Although the most important lessons lie in the similarities across stories rather than in isolated differences, benchmarking our own experience with those people most like ourselves—in occupation, life circumstances, or degree of direction for change—is a useful exercise.

All reinvention stories do not start alike. Some people quit their jobs to make space before they have figured out what they want to do next; others stay, if only nominally, in old roles until the leap is a forgone conclusion. Which of these two paths we take is partially determined by the nature of our old career.

Generally, professionals—consultants, lawyers, financial services professionals, academics, and, to a lesser degree, physicians—are much more likely to continue in their jobs until the new identity is close to fully formed, or at least to withhold quitting until a possible avenue is fairly well defined. Professionals also seem to have an easier time finding ideas for a new career. The reasons have little to do with graduate-education credentials and much to do with the nature of professional work. Professionals simply have more autonomy over their work schedules than do most other occupational groups. They can come into the office late or leave early and take days off when they need them (of course, the quid pro quo includes long hours, missed vacations, and taking work home over weekends). Professionals always have at least one foot on the outside—in their work with clients and their frequent interaction with members of the same profession in the world at large—and that always helps when it comes to reinvention.

Managers bogged down by all manner of internal meetings typically do not have a fraction of that freedom or flexibility. Consequently, they are more likely to suffer from tunnel vision, more likely to need to stop, rest up, and refuel before starting to think about something new. Executive education courses play such a catalytic role for managers precisely because they get them out of the office. That tunnel vision, however, is also the reason why executive programs often involve enough time away to awaken a desire for change but rarely last long enough to point to a new direction. Finding additional ways of stepping back is especially critical for this population; negotiating sabbaticals, chunking up vacations, moving to freelance work, or simply chucking it all without a safety net, are frequently used tactics by managers wanting to move on to the next thing.^[2]

The less time we’ve had to craft experiments, shift our professional connections, and make sense of it all, the more we may need a longer time-out; creative solutions take time and space to surface. Some people, like Gary McCarthy, end up taking more than one sabbatical—one to recharge batteries, another to focus on finding the new career. People who have lost their jobs (even if they have taken a voluntary severance package) are at the greatest risk of short-circuiting the process, since they don’t have the option of staggering their time-outs. Carving a smaller time-out within a longer fallow period—declaring a three-month moratorium on talking to headhunters or working the job sites, during which we give ourselves permission to explore things we enjoy doing even though they are unlikely leads to a next career—can make all the difference in the mind-set we bring to the transition process.^[3]

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career