Career Decisions: The Decision Nobody Can Make for You
Sometimes the hardest career decisions aren't the ones where you have no options. They're the ones where you can see several possibilities, and none of them comes with a guarantee.
You could stay where you are. You could look for something similar somewhere else. You could move into a different kind of role, retrain, take a step sideways, pursue something you've been thinking about for years, or perhaps do nothing for now.
When there are several reasonable options, it's very easy to believe that the answer is more research. Another conversation, another job search, another pros-and-cons list, another assessment, another evening spent looking at roles and trying to imagine whether you would actually enjoy them.
Some of that is useful, of course. Career decisions deserve thought. But there is a point where gathering more information stops helping you make the decision and starts helping you avoid it.
Why career decisions can feel so difficult
I've seen this happen with people who are thoughtful, capable and genuinely trying to make a good decision about their careers. They aren't being indecisive because they don't care enough. Quite often, it's the opposite. The decision matters to them, so they want to get it right.
The problem is that careers rarely give us enough information to know with certainty that a decision is right before we make it.
You can research an industry, speak to people doing the work, understand the salary, look at job advertisements and learn as much as possible about what a role involves. What you can't completely know is how it will feel to do that work yourself, whether you'll enjoy the environment, how your priorities might change or what opportunities that decision might lead to later.
If you're waiting for enough information to remove all of that uncertainty, you may be waiting for something that simply doesn't exist.
And that's when a fairly predictable cycle can begin: more research creates more possibilities, more possibilities create more uncertainty, and more uncertainty sends you back to doing more research. You feel busy with the decision, but you're not necessarily getting any closer to making it.
The pressure to make the 'right' career decision
Part of the difficulty is the way we tend to think about career decisions in the first place.
We're often encouraged to approach them as though there is a correct answer waiting to be discovered. Find the right career. Choose the right role. Work out what you're meant to be doing. Make sure the next move is a good one.
That creates an enormous amount of pressure around decisions that, in reality, are often much less permanent than they feel. A role can be a good decision for three years without needing to be the thing you do for the rest of your working life. A sideways move can teach you something important. A job that turns out not to be quite right can still introduce you to people, skills or opportunities that shape what happens next. Even deciding to stay where you are for another year can be an active career decision if you've thought about why you're doing it and what you want to get from that time.
The aim isn't to make a decision that guarantees the perfect outcome. It's to make the best decision you can with the information you have now, and remain willing to adjust as you learn more.
You may not need a decision yet
There's another possibility that I think we overlook when we're trying to work out what to do with our careers: sometimes you don't actually need to make the big decision yet.
You may simply need to get closer to one of the possibilities.
If you're wondering about a different industry, you could speak to someone working in it. If you're considering a particular type of role, you could look at ten real vacancies and see what employers are actually asking for. If you're interested in using a skill differently, you might find a project, course, volunteer opportunity or piece of work that lets you test it.
None of those things commits you to changing careers. They give you information that thinking alone can't provide.
This is why I often find it more useful to think about career decisions as a series of small experiments rather than one enormous choice. Instead of asking yourself to decide what you want to do for the next ten years, ask what you could explore over the next three months. That changes the question considerably. You're no longer trying to predict an entire future. You're deciding what would help you learn something useful next.
Clarity often comes after action
We tend to imagine that career decisions happen in a particular order: first we become clear about what we want, then we make a plan, and finally we take action.
Sometimes that happens. Often, though, the order is much messier.
We try something, learn from it, rule something out, become interested in something else, have a conversation that changes our thinking, or discover that something we thought mattered to us doesn't matter nearly as much as we expected. In other words, some of the information we need to make a career decision only becomes available once we start moving.
That doesn't mean making reckless decisions or changing jobs simply for the sake of doing something. It means recognising the limits of what can be solved through thinking alone.
If you've been circling the same career decision for a while, there is one question that can be surprisingly useful: Are you genuinely lacking information, or are you avoiding a decision?
If information is missing, work out what information would actually help and find a way to get it. But if you've gathered plenty of information and you're still waiting to feel completely certain, it may be worth considering whether certainty has quietly become the requirement you've placed on yourself before you're willing to act.
You don't have to know where it all leads
One of the reasons career decisions can feel so significant is that we're often trying to see too far ahead. We want to know not only whether the next move is right, but where it will lead after that, what it will mean for our earning potential, whether we'll still enjoy it in five years and whether our future self will think we made the right choice. Most of us simply can't know all of that.
What we can do is make thoughtful decisions based on what we know about ourselves now: what matters to us, what we want more or less of in our working lives, what we're curious about, what we're good at and what we're prepared to try. Then we pay attention to what happens.
A career doesn't have to be perfectly planned to be deliberately shaped. Sometimes the next useful step isn't finding the answer. It's doing something that gives you better information for whatever decision comes after it.
Thinking about what comes next?
If you're starting to think more deliberately about your career — whether that means making a change, repositioning yourself or simply working out what you want next — Pick a Path can help you take stock of where you are and decide what to focus on.
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