How do people change careers ? Organizational researchers have rarely asked this question so simply and straightforwardly. Certainly, many have studied how people adapt to new work roles and how their organizations teach them the ropes by putting them through formal and informal socialization experiences. But most of this research was done in the time of the “one career” career.[1] We learned a lot about what accounts for advancement and mobility within a single path but created relatively little knowledge of the sort that might be useful to the person who seeks a change of path.[2 ]Whereas career reinvention is by no means a new phenomenon—we can look to Dante Alighieri, who wrote the Divine Comedy at forty, and Paul Gauguin, who quit his career as a stockbroker and fled to Tahiti to become a painter—the demise of life-time employment has made the topic more pressing. The “new career,” as defined by researchers Michael Arthur and Douglas Hall, among others, is a boundaryless and protean sequence of experiences summarized by the following trends:[3]

  • Mobility: Greater frequency of career moves across employers and careers

  • Reputations built from the outside in: Validation and marketability derived more and more from peoples’ reputation outside their employer firm

  • Create-your-own career paths: Disappearance of external guides for sequences of work experiences and traditional corporate career planning; emergence of internal, self-generated guides; rise of portfolio and project careers

  • Pursuit of meaning: Enterprise viewed as a path to the expression of deeply held identities and values

  • Balance and flexibility: Boundaries between work and nonwork life blur; personal and family reasons play more important roles than before in choices and decisions

Despite the trends, the study of career transitioning is still in its infancy. There is plenty of how-to advice, but we still know precious little about exactly how people change careers. “How” one changes careers is a very different question from “when” or “with what frequency within a given population.” It is also a different question from “What antecedent factors—for example, personality, IQ, risk profile, or quality of network—make the process go faster or more smoothly?” This book breaks new ground by simply focusing on the “how” question and its corollary, “What conditions enable or inhibit taking the leap?” These questions and aims guided the selection of case studies on which the book is based.

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

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