Career changes

None of my career changes involved me “pursuing my passion.” In fact, I’ve found that word “passion” to be a somewhat daunting, almost unreachable standard to inform where I should take my career. Instead, I tried to spend more time using my strengths and doing things that interested me, even if they didn’t reach the level of a true passion.

Ten Big Signs It’s Time for a Career Change – Which Applies to You?

The autumn leaves are beginning to fall, that ‘back to school’ feeling is in the air and squeaky new shoes tramp the pavement as the chill wind blows. There’s an excitement about this time of year, new beginnings, fresh starts, career changes.

Oh yeah, you’re still in your old job. Trudging back and forth to the same office every day, the office that’s made you miserable for the last year and shows no signs of changing or improving. The boss who has overlooked you for promotion twice now. Your colleagues who could very well be robots in human clothing. The long hours, the pittance of a pay packet, the meetings that make you want to kill yourself. The job itself is mind-numbingly dumb, your time wasted, your talents forgotten, that potential you had in abundance as a graduate has been poisoned and polluted by miserable bosses who’ve sucked the life out of you.

Is it time for a change? A change of job or a change of career? That my friend, is the question.

You need to establish if it’s the place , the job itself or where you are in your life that you hate. Could you be happy doing your job but somewhere else? Or will this job always leave you feeling depressed, undervalued and overworked? If that’s the case you need to think about making a career change now.

But first, what are the signs you should be looking out for? Read our list of ten signs it’s time for a career change and you’ll soon spot which ones apply to you. We won’t leave you hanging, either. Skip to the bottom of the article for our advice on how to get you out of there pronto and doing the things you love again.

Wondering if it’s time to change career paths? Have a look at our ten signs that mean it’s time for a re-think. If any of these seem familiar, find out where your passions lie, retrain and make the change.

1. Your body is telling you enough is enough!

Do you get ‘the Sunday-night dread’? If you do then get out of your job. It’s no coincidence that these Sunday-night-specific anxiety attacks come when they do; your body is telling you it knows what’s going to happen on Monday and it isn’t happy about it. Headaches, tension in your muscles and migraines are all signs from your body that you’re in the wrong career.

2. Your job is impacting on your self-esteem

If you are beginning to doubt yourself and the work that you do, then something dramatic needs to change in your working environment. Staying in a job or career that makes you feel bad about yourself as a person is never going to be worth it, no matter what the pay or perks are. No perk is worth feeling down on yourself for. This can seriously impact on your long-term emotional well-being and makes completing the smallest task seem impossible. A fulfilling career should be a boost to your confidence and self-esteem, not the opposite of that.

3. You’re only there for the money

“Can’t buy me love,” someone once sang. And it’s the same when you’re heart’s not in your job. Having enough money to live on and to be content is very important, but earning lots of money in a job that sacrifices your own happiness is not worth the pay-off. Having a career where you feel like you are following your calling and that brings personal and professional satisfaction beats all that money hands down. Material things will never make up for hating your job, because even with those beautiful, designer shoes, you’ll still be walking to the same office every day.

4. You dream of a different career

If you’re spending your time sitting at your desk, twirling your hair around your finger, Googling jobs, bookmarking interesting companies in your browser and wondering wistfully what it might be like to work from your bed or a friend’s co-working space, then you need to get out of your job and into a career that interests you. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Listen to your heart and make changes to your career to make it happy.

5. You’re lacking energy and you’re eternally bored

No one expects to be fascinated at work all day everyday. We all have days when we lack the energy and enthusiasm to be at the top of our game. But this should not be everyday. We may find one particular task an annoyance, but when we find our whole job/organisation/career boring then it’s time for a change. Depleting energy levels can also be a sign that something’s not right and your work variables need a shake-up.

6. You’ve become disconnected from your passions

You feel disconnected from the original reason you started out in your career. Perhaps the creativity that originally enticed you is no longer a part of your job and you spend more time managing accounts or sitting in meetings than creating anything of substance. Getting back to the fundamental reasons why you started out in that career can help you when thinking about changing – are those values still what you would look for in your career or have they altered as you’ve grown older and more experienced?

7. You’re jealous of friends’ jobs

Feelings of jealousy towards the jobs, careers or work cultures of friends or family can be a key directional signal that you want to be doing something else, somewhere else. Rather than dismissing jealousy as a bad thing, try to analyze why you might feel that way. Is it the job role you are jealous of or the motivational company culture? Is it the flexibility of their role or the creativity? When thinking about it try to be as honest with yourself as you can: it can be a very practical way of pinpointing exactly where you want to be going with your own career.

How To Change Careers, According To 50 People Who Made A Pivot

The most unsettling periods of my own life have been when I made a major career change, whether that involved quitting medical school to pursue a career in business, relocating from San Francisco to London, or leaving the corporate world to start my own career consultancy.

Make no mistake, career pivots involve more friction, disruption, and risk than simply staying on a more linear, traditional career path. Having experienced the emotional ups and downs of navigating career changes myself during the past two decades of my professional life, I’m now focused on understanding what it takes to successfully reinvent yourself.

During the past few years as a career change consultant, I’ve spoken with hundreds of people navigating career changes, and I’ve personally interviewed over 50 individuals from 10 countries and five continents who have shared their personal stories of reinvention on my Career Relaunch podcast. Although they span a wide range of ages, backgrounds, industries, and roles, I discovered many common actions and beliefs that seem to separate individuals who manage pull off radical career changes from those who don’t.

Every time I’ve tried to take my career in a new direction, it’s taken me longer than expected. Figuring out what I wanted to do after I dropped out of medical school took me a solid three years of confusion, reflection, and exploration followed by another two years of additional schooling in business school honing in on my new career direction.

Stephen Satterfield, restaurant manager turned founder of the Whetstone food magazine, says overnight successes simply don’t have very often. “Any successful business venture is the product of hard work, day after day, month after month, year after year, until there’s a significant breakthrough.” His journey to become a food writer and editor has come with setbacks and challenges, but he’s stuck with it and continued to gain steady progress and traction.

Whenever I used to rush through things as a child, my father used to remind me of an old Chinese proverb, “The more haste, the less speed.” Most of my career changes have indeed resulted from time-consuming, consistent steps to make the progress I wanted rather than a sudden pivot.

Anne Tumlinson, former Senior Vice President at a health policy consulting firm turned Daughterhood community founder believes difficulty is an inevitable part of any worthwhile change journey. “Just because something’s hard, doesn’t mean you’re failing. Progress is so much less about talent than it is about time, effort, commitment, and consistency.” This attitude has helped her become an independent consultant and steadily build an ever-growing Daughterhood community of engaged women across the country committed toward supporting one another in caring for their aging parents.

I’m a planner. So I take comfort in first having a solid plan mapped out with all contingencies fully in place before I act. This attitude has prevented me from being sloppy in my life but also hindered me from taking action. For that very reason, career transitions have been especially unsettling because I’ve had to make a leap without feeling like I had everything fully figured out.

Chris Donovan, who spent 25 years as a telephone repairman, took small steps to pursue his lifelong interest in shoe design, even though he didn’t know precisely where they would lead him. He first signed up for a 2-day shoe design class in NYC. The instructor, after seeing Chris’s designs, encouraged him to pursue shoe design more seriously. With no design background, he applied for and got into the Polimoda Fashion Institute in Florence, Italy as a complete outlier student. “Most of the other students were in their early 20s while I was 55. I was older than the teachers. I even got mistaken for a janitor a couple times.” After successfully completing the program, and navigating his way through the complicated world of finding a manufacturer, he’s now working on producing his first line of high-end women’s shoes.

Sometimes, I hesitate to invest time into something unless I know for certain it will lead to something worthwhile. This gets quite circular because I often don’t know whether something is worthwhile until I actually try it.

Vicky Dain erred on the side of exploration as a way of uncovering where she wanted to take her career. After growing disenchanted with her role as a corporate lawyer, she resigned from her role and stepped away from work, going through a period of time she called a “fertile void” to allow herself to really explore other career ideas. “I’m only going to give my ideas full respect if I actually go and try them all.” She spent several months dabbling in a range of interests—everything from writing to baking to farming to carpentry as a way of testing the waters. She realized through these explorations that working with people at a really personal level was appealing to her. “Human behaviour, attitudes, and human interactions were really fascinating to me.” She eventually identified clinical psychology as the career she wanted to pursue, and has since begun her clinical training.

15 High-Paying Jobs That Are Great for Career Changers

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As a person who changed careers six times before age 35, I am proof that drastic pivots are possible. From an initial trajectory in art business, then a transition to IT and banking due to the Great Recession of 2008, to a final switch to writing and communications, each change got me closer to professional fulfillment.

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If you’ve decided you’re also interested in moving to a new role, field, and/or industry, a career change is absolutely possible. This is particularly relevant now that the pandemic has brought about changes in mindset, priorities, and workflow, with lasting impacts on how people navigate their careers—and what they want from their work lives.

Switching careers not only allows you to evolve professionally, but it can also be lucrative. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the average pay for all occupations in 2020 was $56,310. Here we’ll include only “high-paying” positions with an average salary above that. (Note that salary numbers below come from PayScale, which updates its database nightly, and reflect the latest data as of March 2022.)

• It’s in demand: The need for this type of job is higher than average and/or it’s in a growing sector.
• It doesn’t require a new degree: Depending on your background, you may not have to get another degree to obtain some of these positions—either a particular degree isn’t required or you could transfer your existing education and experience to the new role.
• It makes use oftransferable skills: This might include skills you already have or ones you can obtain with practice or training instead of extensive continuing education.
• It’s not limited to people with only one specific background: Folks hiring look at candidates with a variety of professional and educational experiences.
• You can land it without going back to square one: You won’t have to take on an internship, part-time role, or entry-level position to break into the field.

Data scientist is a broad term for roles that can include data engineering, data research, data visualization, and more. But in essence, data scientists manage and analyze large amounts of data to answer business questions and communicate their insights to coworkers and managers. A bachelor’s degree in data science, computer engineering, math, statistics, or similar is useful, but because you need to have analytical and interpersonal skills, you can also switch to the job from a business or communications background. Taking courses or enrolling in a bootcamp can help you build up the necessary knowledge base. When applying for a job, knowing how your unique background can add value to the company (especially if the organization isn’t exactly sure what it wants or needs) can also give you an edge.

A software engineer designs and evaluates computer applications or programs to solve business problems. This involves a lot of coding—whether developing new code, fixing bugs, or solving wide-scale issues. Software engineering jobs exist in a number of industries from tech and IT to retail, defense, and healthcare. The BLS projects employment for software engineers will grow 22% between 2020 and 2030—that’s much faster than the average growth for all occupations and translates to more than 400,000 new jobs. Obviously, having an undergraduate degree in computer science and/or experience coding is one way to get this kind of job. However, coding bootcamps are a very helpful way to build necessary experience that’ll help you land a job without a traditional degree.

Lots of people need help managing their money. Financial planners help clients meet their short-, medium-, and long-term financial goals through advice on investments, savings, and estate planning. Many financial planners have a college degree in business or finance, but not all. In the 2020 Survey of Trends in the Financial Planning Industry, 12% of respondents said they started in some other finance or banking position and moved into financial planning, and 6% of respondents said that the move was a major switch. But, yes, you may need to take necessary coursework in investments, taxes, and/or risk management to switch to a planner role. In addition to working at a financial firm, you could become an entrepreneur and build a client base on your own, since many financial planners are self-employed.

Sources:

https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/career-change/career-change/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephliu/2019/04/02/successfully-change-careers/?sh=54f44d5525cf
https://www.themuse.com/advice/6-highpaying-jobs-that-are-great-for-career-changers
Career changes

If you are stuck for ideas, it’s worth doing a career assessment as this will highlight the types of careers and tasks that are best suited to your skills, interests and experience. It’ll also tell you how suited you are to a range of careers so if you’ve got something in mind, you can find out if you’re on the right track or whether you need to think again.

Table of contents

Happiness and career are proven to be very much intertwined, partly because we spend so much of our adult life working. Of course there are different circumstances and practicalities for each person to consider – you may have a lot of financial responsibilities and feel you can’t walk away from a secure income; but is it worth giving up a happy life? And is it really secure in the long-term?

You are as capable now – and more capable in many respects – to learn new skills then when you were 22. You have the gift of experience. And you have real commitment. However, the bigger question with career change after a certain age is typically a question of practicality. Usually the 40-year-old has more responsibilities to consider than the 28 year old – maybe it’s family, a mortgage etc.

Of course, this is very much contextual and will depend on each individual case. However while it may more practical for one person to switch careers quickly – just because it takes a little more planning and time, doesn’t mean to say that it’s not feasible. You just have to be strategic in your approach.

When s hould you make a career change?

Every once in a while, you can feel uninterested or unmotivated about work. Many times that feeling can indicate that you need to take a break from work and unwind. But if this feeling persists over an extended period, you may need to look deeper and evaluate if this is the job you want to do for the rest of your life. Here are a few clear signs that point toward an impending career change.

You are not adding value

When you consistently perform well at a job, you know that you are adding value to an organization’s long-term goals and vision. It is also easier to feel good about yourself when you consistently meet deadlines and perform to your best potential.

The opposite is true when you’re feeling disconnected from your work and your organization. You may not be clear anymore about why you took up this job, and you’re consistently underperforming. Deadlines are slipping by, making you question if you are even a good fit for the job.

This apathy toward your work is a clear sign that you need to make a career change. If you’re having trouble feeling like you are adding value to your workplace, you should start looking for other opportunities.

You experience eternal boredom

We all have days when we aren’t exactly fired up about the work we do. Instead, we find ourselves daydreaming about the next vacation or even a clean break from the work we are currently doing. If this feeling starts extending from a few days to almost every day, it might be the time to look for your next move.

Boredom at work can make even small tasks seem tedious and leave you with depleted energy levels at the end of a workday. When the feeling of dread about your work starts spilling into other areas of your life, it is a surefire sign that you need to change your job.

The only reason to stay is the money

The monetary compensation offered for a job plays a crucial role in whether you choose to take it up or not. But your paycheck shouldn’t be your only reason for showing up to work every day. If this sounds like you, it’s time to find another job that excites you.

You don’t see a future in the current career

If you are not excited about leveling up in your current job, consider whether you’re even on the right career path. You may be taking every day as it comes, and you don’t think about where you want your career to go over the next few years.

The good and the bad of career change

While changing jobs means an opportunity to learn new skills and grow in your career, the shift also comes with uncertainty. You don’t know whether you will like your new career path or whether it will provide financial security. You can take stock of the benefits and downsides of making a career shift to be better prepared for the outcomes.

Pros of changing your career

1. Learn new skills : Doing the same work day in and day out can often make you feel like your learning curve has flattened. Moving on to a new job gives you a chance to freshen up skills, learn new tools and ways of doing things, and level up.
2. Get a fresh perspective : If you stay in one position for a long time, you may feel a sense of stagnation and dullness . Even if there’s nothing wrong with the organization, you can become complacent or just not inspired or challenged. Moving on to a new role and a new organization makes you take stock and do some inner work. It can often give you a fresh perspective on your skills and the overall job market as well as on your values and preferences.
3. Lower stress : When you feel you’re not adding value through your work, it can make you feel stressed about your career path. Changing jobs can relieve you of that stress, as you will feel more in control of the direction your career is taking.
4. Find core competency : When you get stuck in the routine of a job, you often lose sight of your core skills and strengths that may not be fully utilized in your current role. A career shift can allow you to re flect on those strengths and build a career out of those.
5. Expand network : Switching roles and industries opens up new avenues for you to network and learn from these people.

Cons of changing your career

1. Financial insecurity : Leaving a stable, paying job behind and jumping back into the job market can put pressure on your finances. Ensure you have enough savings to tide out the period when you are looking for new opportunities and figuring out the next steps in your career move.
2. Trial and error : You have decided that you do not want to stick with your current job anymore and want to move to the next opportunity as soon as possible. However, you are not yet sure about what this next move will be. Even if you know the next steps, they almost certainly will not work out exactly as you had planned. Being prepared for some uncertain months as you figure out your career change is a good idea.
3. Learning curve : When you switch industries at a mid-to-senior career level, you have missed building fundamental skills that may be required for a career path in your chosen industry. Proactively learning new skills and gaining industry knowledge may be a way to increase your chances of growth in the new industry.
4. Prove your worth : Making a career change often means you have to prove to new managers and colleagues the value you bring to the organization and your new team and role. You’ll likely need to go out of your comfort zone and perform job duties that you’re unfamiliar with. However, once you gain your new employer’s trust in your abilities, it can set you up for future growth.
5. Increased competition : When you are jumping into a new industry or organization, you are pitting yourself against internal candidates who have been in the industry for a long time and know the workings of the sector. However, you can educate yourself about an organization or an industry before applying to jobs there, so you are not shooting arrows in the dark.

Plan your career change

It’s easy to get lost down rabbit holes, get stuck and give up when facing the challenges of changing career on your own. But when you get help, the whole process becomes faster, easier and, most important of all, is more likely to deliver the result you want: a new career that you love.

Can you change your career without any help? Yes, you can but it’ll probably take you longer and may not give you exactly what you’re looking for. Doing it on your own can also be lonely. It’s hard to keep going when there’s nobody there to pick you up when you’re down. It’s difficult to know what to do when you don’t have those nuggets of expertise or feedback that allow you to take your next step with confidence.

So, I retrained and moved into IT with a view to becoming a website editor. But once I’d retrained, that job didn’t seem to be available to me so I became an Intranet manager instead. But that turned out not to be the right career for me at all.

Fast-forward a few years and I’m finally doing what I always wanted to do: writing, coaching and teaching. I wish I’d taken some careers advice when I left my publishing job because if I had, I believe I would have got where I am today faster and with a lot less stress.”

Making it happen

There’s no doubt that changing your career takes time, effort and persistence. It’s definitely not something that happens overnight. It means you’re going to need to have a willingness to learn and grow if you’re going to succeed.

1. It’s not all about taking profiling tests, rewriting your CV and doing research. It takes more than that. It involves doing some inner work too, like building your belief that you can do this and working on your confidence.
2. Once you can clearly identify what is important to you about your career dream or goal, you’ll be able to put a strategy in place that delivers the result you want. And that’s so much easier when you have a career consultant by your side.
3. When you have the support and guidance of a career change consultant, you can quickly work out what you’re good at, what career options are open to you and how to go about making your career transition.
4. So, if you’re ready to get your career change underway, take the online Career Assessment now.
5. Simply input a few details about yourself, your career and what you want next. Then, in just a few minutes, you’ll get a report detailing the careers open to you delivered straight to your inbox.
6. From here, we’ll help you decide on what the next best step is for you.

Sources:

https://www.ictskillnet.ie/news/career-change-6-critical-things-to-know/
https://www.betterup.com/blog/guide-to-changing-career
https://careerconsultants.co.uk/change-of-career/
Career changes

When Susan Fontaine decided to leave her consulting career, it was with good reason. A single mother of two, she was finding the travel and other demands on her personal life increasingly intolerable. She quit her job and resolved to spend some time exploring her options. That resolve vanished, however, when financial pressure coincided with a flattering offer to join the management team of a former client. She accepted the new position only to discover that its demands would be very similar to those of the position she had left. “I thought, ‘What have I done?’” she later told me. “I had had the opportunity to leave all that!” By hoping to solve all her problems in one fell swoop, Susan made a change that amounted to no change at all. Two weeks into the new job, she resigned.

How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career

If so, consider the counterintuitive approach described in this article. It’ll have you doing instead of infinitely planning. Taking action instead of endless self-assessment tests. You’ll reinvent your working identity—your sense of who you are as a professional—by experimenting with who you could be.

Consider the traditional “plan and implement” approach to career change: Assess your interests, skills, and experience; identify appropriate jobs; consult friends, colleagues, career counselors; take the plunge.

This all sounds reasonable—but it actually fosters stagnation. You get mired in introspection while searching for your “one true self ”a futile quest, since individuals have many possible selves. Your ideal won’t necessarily find a match in the real world. Worse, this method encourages making a big change all at once—which can land you in the wrong job.

Sounds Crazy, but…

Now consider the “test and learn” method: You put several working identities into practice, refining them until they’re sufficiently grounded in experience to inspire more decisive steps. You make your possible future working identities vivid, tangible, and compelling—countering the tendency to grab familiar work when the unknown becomes too scary.

A former investment banker dabbled in wine tours and scuba diving businesses before determining that such work wouldn’t hold his interest long-term. Realizing a “more normal” career path would better serve his emotional and financial needs, he is now a internal venture capitalist for a media company.

An investment banker considering fiction writing visited an astrologer, who noted that forces pulling him in opposing directions (stability versus creative expression) were irreconcilable. He told everyone this story and wrote about it in his local newspaper. The more he communicated it, the more the incident made sense—and the more friends and family supported his writing ambitions.

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. Most everyone knows a story, too, about a person who ditched a 20-year career to pursue something completely different—the lawyer who gave it all up to become a writer or the auditor who quit her accounting firm to start her own toy company—and is the happier for it.

“Am I doing what is right for me, or should I change direction?” is one of the most pressing questions in the mid-career professional’s mind today. The numbers of people making major career changes, not to mention those just thinking about it, have risen significantly over the last decade and continue to grow. But the difference between the person who yearns for change yet stays put and the person who takes the leap to find renewed fulfillment at midcareer is not what you might expect. Consider the following examples:

Susan Fontaine made a clean break with her unfulfilling past as partner and head of the strategy practice at a top consulting firm. But the former management consultant—her name, like the names of the other people I studied, has been changed for this article—had not yet had the time to figure out a future direction. When a close client offered her the top strategy job at a Financial Times 100 firm, she took it. She was ready for change, and the opportunity was too good to pass up. To her dismay, this position—though perfect according to what she calls “the relentless logic of a post-MBA CV”—was no different from her old job in all the aspects she had been seeking to change. Two weeks into the new role, she realized she had made a terrible mistake.

After a four-week executive education program at a top business school, Harris Roberts, a regulatory affairs director at a major health care firm, was ready for change. He wanted bottom-line responsibility, and he itched to put into practice some of the cutting-edge ideas he had learned in the program. His long-time mentor, the company’s CEO, had promised, “When you come back, we’ll give you a business unit.” But upon Harris’s return, a complicated new product introduction delayed the long-awaited transition. He was needed in his old role, so he was asked to postpone his dream. As always, Harris put the company first. But he was disappointed; there was no challenge anymore. Resigned to waiting it out, he created for himself a “network of mentors,” senior members of the firm whom he enlisted to guide his development and help him try to land the coveted general management role. Eighteen months later, he was still doing essentially the same job.

A milestone birthday, upheaval in his personal life, and a negative performance evaluation—the first of his career—combined to make a “snapping point” for Gary McCarthy. After business school, the former investment banker and consultant had taken a job at a blue-chip firm by default, biding his time until he found his “true passion.” Now, he decided, it was time to make a proactive career choice. Determined to get it right, Gary did all the correct things. He started with a career psychologist who gave him a battery of tests to help him figure out his work interests and values. He talked to head-hunters, friends, and family and read best-selling books on career change. By his own account, none of the advice was very useful. He researched possible industries and companies. He made two lists: completely different professions involving things he was passionate about and variations on what he was already doing. A year later, a viable alternative had yet to materialize.

When I consider the experiences of these people and dozens of others I have studied over the past few years, there can be no doubt: Despite the rhetoric, a true change of direction is very hard to swing. This isn’t because managers or professionals are typically unwilling to change; on the contrary, many make serious attempts to reinvent themselves, devoting large amounts of time and energy to the process at great professional and personal risk. But despite heroic efforts, they remain stuck in the wrong careers, not living up to their potential and sacrificing professional fulfillment.

Is It OK to Change Careers at My Age?

Age is just a number – and in Britain, employees in the workplace are protected from age discrimination and ageism in the workplace by the Equality Act of 2010. Despite this legal protection, those over 40 can often feel worried that their age will work against them in the search for a new career in spite of their greater experience and skills, much of which may be transferable.

Even people in their 30s can feel trapped in a career and unable to make a move. While there are many jobs in the UK, many are part-time or self-employed, and taking a pay cut can be daunting; it’s also normal to worry that you could be making a mistake.

There is no denying that changing your career at a later stage of life – especially when you have already established yourself in your current one – is a challenge, especially when you consider potential pay cuts and starting afresh. However, if you’re not happy in your current role, then changing careers may make you happier.

One thing to remember is that you cannot get back your time: being stuck in a career that no longer feels right for you can leave you feeling trapped and reduce the quality of your life. No matter what age you are, switching careers to try something new, learn new skills, and build something you enjoy and are proud of is a valid move.

If a reduced salary is a concern to you due to your financial situation, it may be worth exploring the skilled trades – jobs such as gas engineering, plumbing, and becoming an electrician. Britain’s current skills shortage means there are not enough workers in these positions, which means that there are high starting salaries, even for beginners.

60+ Career Change Statistics for 2022 [That You Didn’t Know!]

#1. Stats on What Stops People From Making a Career Change

• 43% of workers who consider working in science, technology, engineering, and maths think they lack industry-related qualifications. Another 5% of workers are discouraged by the shortage of role models in the field. Source: NTT Data UK
• 32% of Britain’s working population struggle to find other fields in which they could use their current skills, and only 16% know exactly how they could transfer their skills to a different career path. Source: City & Guilds Group
• A third (34%) of Britons worry about having to make a fresh start in their career, another 21% of Britain’s working population remain in their current positions due to a lack of knowledge required in other fields, and around 19% of respondents admit they don’t have enough confidence to make a career change. Source: City & Guilds Group
• 31% of British workers between the ages 25-34 say they don’t have enough knowledge in another field to make a career change, 41% worry about making a fresh start, 21% are concerned about retraining costs, and another 32% don’t change careers due to a lower salary in a different field. Source: City & Guilds Group
• 22% of workers over the age of 50 don’t believe they have the experience and skills required to work in a different field. Source: NowTeach

#2. Stats on Age of People Looking to Make a Career Change

• Workers in the age group of 25-34 are more willing to learn new skills (14%) or switch their career paths to a completely different direction (14%) compared to people across all other age groups (10% and 9% respectively). Source: Aviva
• Nearly 9 out of 10 (87%) people under the age of 25 plan to reconsider their current job situation and potentially change their career path in 2022. Source: Aviva
• A combination of mid-career stagnation and financial stability leads most people to make a major career change at the average age of 39 years old. Source: CNBC
• In Britain’s working population, the 25-34 age group is the least willing to change careers. Source: City & Guilds Group
• 11% of workers over the age of 50 wish to make a career change. Source: NowTeach
• In a survey of older workers, 82% of respondents reported having successfully switched to a new career after the age of 45. Most older adults who made career changes later in life were successful in their new jobs. Source: American Institute for Economic Research
• 80% of people over the age of 45 consider a change in careers, but only 6% of them actually pursue it. Source: The Conference Board

#3. Stats on Wanting More Work Flexibility

• 76% of workers want to have the opportunity to work remotely and have a flexible schedule. Source: CNBC
• 41% of Americans intending to switch careers are looking for flexible job opportunities, such as remote work. Source: CNBC
• Nearly half (48%) of workers find remote work less stressful because of its numerous benefits, including not having to dress up for work (42%), not having to drive to work (57%), and being closer to family (29%). Source: Aviva
• A considerably smaller portion of workers – only 19% – find remote work more stressful, mentioning the inability to switch off (43%), the lack of a proper working space (27%), and the lack of interactions with colleagues (36%). Source: Aviva
• More than half (68%) of workers in the United States think that the perfect workplace model is a combination of working remotely and working on-site. Source: Prudential
• 87% of American workers want to keep the option to work from home at least once a week after the pandemic is over. Source: Prudential
• Only 23% of workers expect to have a say in whether and how to work from home after the pandemic subsides. Others expect their company (42%), department/region/location (15%), or their managers (15%) to make the decision. Source: CNBC|SurveyMonkey
• 1 in 3 people doesn’t want to work in a company that requires them to work on-site every day. Source: Prudential
• 18% of all workers and 34% of remote workers in the United States seek a job in which they can work remotely. Source: Prudential
• In a survey of 1,000 white-collar professionals, 94% said they would benefit from work flexibility, although 30% said they feared consequences in terms of their professional growth if they chose to work remotely. The top benefits mentioned by the participants were less stress/improved mental health (43%) and better work-life balance (38%). Source: Deloitte
• Regarding flexible work options, 1 in 3 say it would increase their job satisfaction and morale, and almost 30% say it would increase their overall productivity or efficiency at work. 80% of professionals agree a traditional work setting is important for advancing their career and 52% of the respondents say that leaders and managers have the greatest impact on advancing a culture of flexibility in their organization. Source: Deloitte

Sources:

https://hbr.org/2002/12/how-to-stay-stuck-in-the-wrong-career
https://www.skillstg.co.uk/blog/how-to-change-career/
https://novoresume.com/career-blog/career-change-statistics