Interview Method

For the core study, I conducted thirty-nine in-depth interviews. The group included people at different stages of transition. Some were in the midst of making the career change or starting to contemplate a change; others had taken the leap already. Some of the interviews, therefore, were retrospective. In many cases, however, I followed a person over a period of several years, from an early desire to make a change through the in-between period to the actual leap to a new career (and, in a few cases, as he or she circled back to a second search after moving into something that did not work out for the long term).

To track the trajectories of the ongoing process subsample, I conducted an average of three interviews with each person over a period of two years. The initial interview was open-ended, often beginning with the question “Tell me about your career to date” (see figure A-1 for a typical interview protocol). Between the interviews, I had informal e-mail exchanges and telephone conversations with participants to keep track of their progress. Many of them regularly sent me updates.

I conducted all the interviews between July 1999 and December 2001. Interviews typically lasted two hours, ranging from one to three hours. Most of the interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim. In some cases, when a person was more at ease without the tape recorder, I took extensive handwritten notes, which I transcribed at the earliest possible time after the interview, never more than two days later.

I supplemented the core study with many shorter interviews with other people in transition as well as with a range of career-change professionals, including headhunters, venture capitalists, career counselors, and outplacement specialists. I also attended a host of career-change seminars, events, and conferences. To provide further context and to verify my findings, I polled my executive education students in the United States and Europe about their career paths and ambitions and honed my ideas by using them in the classroom as teaching material for classes on career development. I conducted public workshops on career reinvention in which I gathered many more stories and points of view. I searched for articles from the business and popular press, for existing case studies or reinvention memoirs from a wider set of people in transition in order to refine my thinking about the applicability of these ideas across a range of career moves.

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