Career Tips

Changing Your Career: Doing Comes First, Knowing Second We like to think that the key to a successful career change is knowing what we want to do next, then using that knowledge to guide our actions. But studying people in the throes of the career change process (as opposed to afterward, when hindsight is always 20/20) led me to a startling conclusion: Change actually happens the other way around. Doing comes first, knowing second.

Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career Everyone knows a story about a smart and talented businessperson who has lost his or her passion for work, who no longer looks forward to going to the office yet remains stuck without a visible way out.

Can You Actually Afford to Change Your Career? Our current job has lost its spark, but it’s stable. Dependable. Reliable. Steady. We worry and wonder: What would a career change do to our bank accounts? To our way of life? To our family? We assume that a major reinvention would involve a gap between paychecks when we’d leave our job and break into a new field. Sometimes we think (or we know) that the career we’d love would fill our days with more meaning but pay us less (significantly less, even).

For Career Direction, Use Your Imagination Do you know what you want to do with your career? What if you don’t? You first must imagine what the right career field might be. That’s easy to say, but hard to do. There are productive ways to look for clues about what might work for you.

Two Ways to Clarify Your Professional Passions Have you ever noticed that highly effective people almost always say they love what they do? If you ask them about their good career fortune, they will likely advise that you have to love what you do in order to perform at a high level of effectiveness.

Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want (Part 1) Fatima (who asked not to be identified by her real name) would admit that she feels stagnant in her job, trapped by the tension between day-to-day demands and what she really wants to be doing: exploring how the company can use social media in its marketing efforts.

Developing A Strategy For A Life Of Meaningful Labor In a world of constant disruption, both opportunity and uncertainty exist in the workplace. All of us need a new way of thinking about work and taking personal responsibility for our careers, which last 45 years and beyond.

Why So Many of Us Experience a Midlife Crisis A midcareer crisis can happen to anyone. Canadian psychoanalyst and organizational consultant Elliott Jaques coined the term midlife crisis: that period in our lives when we come face-to-face with our limitations, our restricted possibilities, and our mortality. This experience hits even those who objectively have the most fulfilling jobs.

Strategies To Renew Your Career There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for restoring meaning and passion to your life. However, there are strategies for assessing your life and making corrections if you’ve gotten off course.