What happens when your definition of career success changes?
Sometimes a career decision is difficult because you genuinely don’t know what you want.
But sometimes you do know. The difficult part is everything that comes with admitting it.
We recently had a conversation with someone who has had what most people would probably describe as a very successful career. They’ve managed businesses, taken on significant responsibility and spent years building experience and credibility.
But they’ve reached a point where they don’t really want that anymore. They don’t want to run the business or carry all the responsibility that comes with being the person in charge. What they actually want sounds much simpler: to work for someone else, do a good job and have work take up a different amount of space in their life.
What made the conversation particularly interesting was that they didn’t seem especially confused about what they wanted. Underneath it all, they had a pretty good idea.
The difficult part was everything surrounding the decision. Because what do you do when the career you’ve spent years building is no longer the career you want?
Our definition of career success can change
We tend to have a fairly conventional idea of what career progression looks like. You gain experience, take on more responsibility, earn more, manage bigger teams and move into increasingly senior positions.
If you’ve spent 15 or 20 years successfully doing that, choosing something with less responsibility can feel strangely difficult to explain, even to yourself. Career research makes an interesting distinction between objective career success and subjective career success.
Objective career success includes the things we can see and measure from the outside, such as salary, seniority, promotions and status. Subjective career success is much more personal. It considers whether your career is giving you the things that matter to you, which might include satisfaction, balance, meaningful work, development or having enough space for the rest of your life.
And the two don't necessarily keep moving in the same direction.
You can become more successful on paper while becoming less interested in the life that success requires.
That can be a difficult thing to reconcile, particularly when you’ve spent years working towards the things you now find yourself questioning.
The career you wanted then may not be the career you want now
The work you wanted at 30 doesn't necessarily have to be the work you want at 45, 50 or 60.
Your life changes. Your financial position might change. Your family changes. What matters to you outside work may change. You've also had another 10 or 20 years to discover what you enjoy, what you're good at and perhaps just as importantly, what you no longer want.
Research into sustainable careers reflects this idea too. Our measures of career success can shift throughout our working lives, with things such as time, balance and personal meaning sitting alongside more traditional measures such as pay and progression.
The problem is that careers carry a lot of momentum.
Once you've reached a certain level, the assumption is usually that the next move should build on it: more responsibility, more money, a bigger remit or a more impressive title.
We don't have particularly good language for saying, “I've done that. I'm good at it. I just don't want more of it.”
So what might have started as a fairly simple realisation — I don't want this anymore — becomes a much more complicated career decision.
What will people think? What about everything I've invested in getting here? What if I earn less? What if an employer thinks I'm overqualified? What if I regret it? Does this look like I'm going backwards?
The more you've built, the harder it can be to change direction
There can be a lot wrapped up in a career by the time you've reached a senior level.
A salary isn't only money. It can represent years of progression. A senior title isn't just a title. It may have become part of how you introduce yourself and how other people see you. Your reputation, network and professional identity have all grown around the career you've built.
Choosing something different can therefore feel as though you're somehow throwing all of that away.
But your experience doesn't disappear simply because you decide to use it differently.
Someone who has spent years leading a business doesn't stop having leadership skills because they no longer want to be the person ultimately responsible for one. Their judgement, commercial experience, relationships and ability to solve problems all come with them.
Perhaps instead of asking, “How do I make sure I don't waste everything I've built?”, a better question is, “How do I want to use what I've built now?” That's a very different way of approaching a career change.
Wanting less responsibility doesn't necessarily mean wanting less
This distinction matters. Someone may still want interesting work, challenge, good people around them and opportunities to contribute. They may want to keep learning and use the experience they've accumulated over their career.
They may simply no longer want those things packaged with a bigger team, longer hours or the expectation that work occupies such a large part of their life. Perhaps the ambition hasn't disappeared. Its definition has changed. Instead of asking, “How far can I go?”, the question may have become, “What kind of working life do I actually want?”
Separate what you want from what's making it difficult
If you're wrestling with a career decision like this, it can be useful to separate two questions that very easily become tangled together: What do I actually want? And: What is making it difficult for me to act on that? They're not the same question. Some of what is making the decision difficult will be practical. Money matters. Family commitments matter. The realities of the job market matter. If you're considering roles below your current level, how employers interpret your motivation may matter too.
Those are real considerations but they're also things you can investigate. What salary could you realistically live with? What roles are actually available? How could you explain the move so an employer understands that it's deliberate rather than assuming you'll leave as soon as something more senior comes along? Other things might be harder to quantify: “What will people think?” “Am I wasting my experience?” “Does this mean I've failed?” Or perhaps the much bigger question: “Who am I if I'm not the CEO, director, partner or manager anymore?”
Those questions deserve attention too but they're different problems. Separating the practical barriers from the expectations, fears and assumptions surrounding the decision can make it much easier to understand what you're actually stuck on.
Are you really going backwards?
The language of “going backwards” can be particularly unhelpful in career decisions because it judges your next move against the direction you've been travelling rather than the direction you now want to go.
A role with a smaller salary isn't automatically a worse career decision. A job without direct reports isn't necessarily a step backwards. Choosing not to pursue the next promotion doesn't mean you've stopped developing.
Careers don't exist independently of our lives. If the career that once fitted your life no longer does, choosing something different isn't automatically regression. It may simply mean your definition of progress has changed.
So if you've been circling the same career decision for a while, perhaps the question isn't:
“What should I do with the rest of my career?” It might be: "If I already know what I want, what is actually stopping me from moving towards it?” Because sometimes the decision itself isn't the part we're stuck on. It's everything we've attached to making it.
Thinking about what you want from work now?
Career decisions can become particularly difficult when you've spent years building a career that no longer fits quite as well as it once did. Pick a Path can help you step back from the noise, work through what's changed and explore what a realistic next step could look like.
Comments