How to Prepare yourself (or others) for a Career Change.
Here’s the headline: Career Change isn’t just a professional move any more. It’s an identity event.
For most of us, work becomes a proxy for self-worth: “What do you do?” quietly means “Who are you?”
That’s why career change can feel less like choosing a new job and more like stepping away from a version of yourself - your credibility, your confidence, your clarity.
And yet, career change is no longer a rare midlife disruption. It’s becoming normal. AARP Research found 78% of workers (aged 35+) have changed careers at least once, with many making additional changes over time.
So the real question isn’t if you’ll navigate a career change.
It’s whether you’ll have a repeatable system for doing it well - without panic, drift, or regret.
Why most people don’t actually change – they drift into the “familiar”
Most people don’t enter a career through having some kind of master plan. They enter organically - a degree, an early job opportunity, a mentor, a move to a new city - and a story forms: “This is who I’m becoming.”
That story works… until it doesn’t.
When the ‘fit’ with the job feels like its breaking, people often assume they should “just pick a new direction.” But career change is hard precisely because the brain treats it as risk.
You’re not only choosing a new job; you’re choosing
- a new ‘status’ ladder (up or down)
- new competence & learning expectations (uncertain work ahead)
- new social proof (“will people like me / still take me seriously?”)
- and often a new llife style trade-off (working part-time or starting a business)
In that risk state, the default behaviour isn’t exploration and excitement. It’s conservation and control. People usually select the nearest credible move - something adjacent, familiar, or easily explained. And safe.
That’s not laziness. It’s a predictable outcome when identity is on the line and the future feels uncertain.
The uncomfortable facts about career change right now.
Fact 1: Organisations aren’t set up to guide people through change
Most organisations still treat career development as a “nice-to-have,” even as employees expect faster growth cycles and clearer pathways.
Gartner reports only 46% of employees feel supported trying to grow their careers at their organisation. It also highlights a major transparency gap - employees often don’t know what growth realistically looks like, which fuels frustration and early exits.
And while managers are often positioned as 'the solution', many simply don’t have the time, tools, or training to do this well - especially in a world of hybrid work, with broad diversity of employees, and tackling constant change.
SHRM reports 17% of employees have never had a formal career conversation with their manager.
That’s not a personal problem - it’s an infrastructure problem.
Fact 2: Career change anxiety is rising (because job security feels fragile)
Even when people are employed, many feel unstable: layoffs, automation, AI adoption, reorganisations, and “quiet restructuring” have become permanent background noise.
Recent labour-market coverage highlights how widespread job security concern has become among jobseekers. According to a recent Investopedia study 71% said job security does not seem to be guaranteed for any job, no matter how good you are at it This is driving more people to consider shifts in role, industry, or skill direction.
And the American Psychological Association’s 2025 Work in America survey found job insecurity is having a significant impact on stress levels for a majority of U.S.workers (54%). When people don’tfeel secure about what comes next, anxiety rises - lowering productivity and engagement, and leading to decision paralysis as a predictable outcome.
When uncertainty rises, people don’t just want a new or adapted job. They need a plan.
Fact 3: Most people don’t struggle because they lack ambition. They struggle because they lack a method.
After a decade working with people on career change and career coaching, we’ve seen three patterns repeatedly:
1) Value Blindness: Most people cannot clearly describe the unique value they offer - especially their transferable strengths. They know what they’ve done, but not how to translate it into:
- in-demand capabilities
- portable strengths
- 'how this matters' in a different context
So when they look at a new field, or role in another department - they assume they’re under qualified - even when they’re not.
2) Inaccessible Help: Career support is either:
- too expensive (coaching can be hundreds per hour)
- too opaque (you don’t know what you’ll get), or
- too biased (friends or colleagues can't help you see clearly
This is why career change feels lonely: people have “data in their head,” but no reliable process to turn it into decisions.
3) Future Myopia: Very few people can visualise a realistic future they actually want - especially now, when “new work” can mean full-time employment, part-time employment, contracting, fractional roles, portfolio careers, or building something of your own.
Creating more options for yourself should be freeing. But without a reliable, trusted method, it just creates option paralysis.
The triggers that signal it’s time to consider a change (for you or someone in your team)
Career change is often framed as a dramatic leap. In reality, it usually begins with small signals.
Here are common triggers worth taking seriously:
- Learning runway ends: people can’t see a meaningful next stretch of growth
- Values misalignment: the organisation/industry rewards behaviours people no longer respect
- Lifestyle reality changes: caregiving, health, geography, energy, or season-of-life shifts
- Purpose drift: ‘what you once cared about no longer motivates you’ – people’s life-purpose changes, especially at key life-stage shifts / ages.
- Trust breakdown: psychological safety erodes; people stop speaking up, stop trying, stop showing up.
- Advancement scarcity: people can’t see credible internal progression (and this matters - Gallup reports one in four employees say they lack advancement opportunities). So they seek it elsewhere – recruiters, and job-boards.
These triggers don’t “prove”people are leaving - or you should leave.
But they do indicate you need a structured review before decisions are made, not just more willpower.
Decoding career change with a simple system
The goal isn’t to try to “pick the perfect new career” for yourself or someone in your team. That's guesswork.
The goal is to run a repeatable process that reliably produces good options and clear next steps.
Here’s the 3-step method we’ve designed, tested, and now codified into a digital system:
Step 1: Understand Needs
Don’t start with ideas. Start with a ‘design criteria’.
That includes understanding– for you, or those in your team:
- values (and how they’re changing)
- needs (stability, autonomy, mastery, impact, flexibility)
- strengths and energy patterns (what you’re naturally good at, what works, what bring energy)
- constraints (money, time, responsibilities, risk tolerance)
This step prevents the most common failure: choosing a “valid career” that doesn’t work.
Step 2: Develop Pathways (plural)
Your first idea is rarely the right one.
Build at least two credible pathways before committing:
- one that’s safe (adjacent, transferable, lower risk)
- one that’s true (more aligned, more identity-authentic)
Gartner’s research reinforces this: organisations need to help employees “navigate all possible options for growth,” because the option space is now broader than traditional advancement or mobility models & career ladders.
Step 3: Build Agency to Grow into the new direction
This is where most people stall - because they treat change as an 'experience', not a project.
Agency looks like:
- a skills plan (what to build, in what order)
- a credibility plan (how you’ll prove capability, what experience you need first)
- a stakeholder plan (how you communicate the shift, get buy-in and support)
- a time plan (what weekly effort looks like)
How Actvo helps
Actvo is designed as 'Career Infrastructure' - a guided system that helps people:
- clarify needs and their unique talent
- translate experience into transferable value
- generate multiple pathways
- turn a chosen pathway into an execution plan, with a job in sight
- and keep momentum through guided prompts and structured activities (not just “think about it”- practical everyday guiding and accountability nudging)
It’s built for the reality that career change is no longer a once-in-a-lifetime event.
It’s a recurring life skill.
My Three Pieces of fast advice to Get Started
- Don’t start at ideas. Start with needs.
Ideas are cheap. Fit is everything. Start with knowing the current ‘story of you’. - Expect your first option to be incomplete.
Build multiple pathways so you don’t cling to the first thing that reduces anxiety. It may just create different anxiety. - Treat it like a project.
If you don’t schedule it, it won’t happen. Career change rewards structure - not stress.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
About Actvo
Actvo brings you both a technology tool and a career planning system. Before building Actvo - the self-directed, all-in-one career &skills growth platform - our Founder alone spent more than 16,000 hours using data and behavioural science to mentor and guide professionals across industries and geographies, in career strategies.That work revealed a consistent problem: capable people and growing organisations struggle to turn ambition into structured, sustained development.
Understanding this challenge, and how easily careers drift without clear direction and systems, is in our DNA.
That experience is now encoded in Actvo. The platform that brings career clarity, growth planning, skill development and ongoing support into one system, helping individuals and teams move from intention to consistent progress. Actvo is particularly effective for professionals and organisations that are ambitious but time-poor, providing the structure and visibility needed to make developing people’s performance and progression inside an organisation, simpler.
Keen to find out more? Start a free trial.
.png)
