Selecting the Case Studies

The study evolved from the follow-up to an earlier project, in which I investigated how young professionals advanced (or failed to advance) within their firms’ up-or-out hierarchies. The transition entailed moving from junior, technical, and managerial roles to senior, client-advisory, and revenue-generating positions. Doing an informal follow-up several years after the study was completed, I stumbled onto an interesting natural experiment: Among my study group, some had taken the leap to new and different careers, others were actively planning their escape routes (of these, some with greater promise and optimism than others), and still others were happily continuing onward and upward.

The time was 1999 and the Internet craze was raging. I decided to interview new and would-be Web entrepreneurs, as a point of contrast to the consultants and bankers trying to make their way out of their golden handcuffs. That first subgroup eventually expanded to include a range of people moving from large established firms to start-ups. A Newsweek cover headline captured the ethos of the times: “Everyone’s getting rich but me.”^[8] As another point of contrast, I decided to find a comparison group of people motivated to change careers by a very different set of drivers: social contribution. That led to a series of interviews with people moving from the private to the nonprofit sector.

Another, somewhat overlapping, subset of career changers grew out of my interest in professional careers—in consulting, investment banking, law, and health care. While teaching senior executives from those groups how to retain their best and brightest, I grew more and more interested in what was driving midcareer professionals out and how they prepared their exits. To vary what had started as a predominantly M.B.A. and business background sample, I looked for lawyers, physicians, university professors, and IT professionals who embarked on career transitions that entailed changing occupations.

My case selection process by no means followed a logic of random sampling. Instead, I relied on what qualitative researchers Barney Glaser and Anslem Strauss call “theoretical sampling” and the “constant comparative method.” I added new cases all along, comparing and contrasting the ones I had already to determine whether there were gaps in my coverage of types of transition and selecting new categories and cases to fill those gaps.

The people in my final sample exemplify many varieties and degrees of career reinvention. Some made significant changes in the context in which they work, most typically jumping from large, established companies to small, entrepreneurial organizations or to self-employment. Others made major changes in the content of the work itself, sometimes leaving an occupation, such as medicine or law, for which they had trained many years. Most made significant changes in both context and content, but most important, they experienced a subjective feeling of reaching a crossroad, one that would require psychological change. I settled on a definition of career change that encompassed these three elements.

The sample is certainly biased in that it consists of people who had already started the transition or taken the leap; therefore, it was a group prone to nonconservative response. I do not consider that this poses any challenge to the validity of my arguments, however, because my aim is not to predict who will or will not change careers. Rather, it is to identify the basic tasks of reinvention.