A Six-Stage Process to De-Risk Your Career Shift

It’s the fear that keeps us from moving from daydreams into action

It’s always the fear of something that holds us back when it comes to a career change. I hear the “What if’s?” from clients at the beginning of our work together all of the time. Just a few I encountered in the past few weeks:

“What if I fail?”
“What if no one wants what I’m selling?”
“What if I can’t make enough to pay my bills?”
“What if I hate it?”

Add in your flavor of “What if?” Mine is: “What if the sun goes supernova, and we’re all fried to a crisp?” (Hey, it could happen!)

The fears feel real!

Regardless of how unlikely the above risks are, they still feel real to the individual voicing them. And yes, there are always risks in making a change—even if it’s just a job change. I once changed jobs for what seemed like a prestigious upgrade, only to recognize early on that I had entered a toxic swamp filled with predators. It took me 18 months to unwind that mistake. (It did lead to the best organizational experience of my life!)

The goal in making a career change is to get somewhere new in one piece and ultimately be happy. Happiness takes on a different meaning depending upon your life stage and circumstances. The challenge is to avoid inviting excessive risk into your life.

There’s a framework and process that will help you de-risk your career shift

When working with clients, I rely on a framework I’ve honed over time and trial that I affectionally call my Career Reinvent Framework™. (Note: I was my first-ever career shift client, and I flailed a great deal. Seventeen years removed from that period and having the benefit of working with hundreds of clients, I wish I had known then what I know now. You are the beneficiary here!)

The framework guides you through six different stages, challenging you to tune in to yourself and identify the universe of options that might fit you before distilling down to a navigable few to explore and experiment with on the road to a decision.

This process works, but it takes work.

Place yourself in the following scenario:

Note: This is just one of several scenarios/personas I encounter. From individuals in their twenties to my oldest career shift client in his 80’s, we are all interested in tapping into our talents and doing work that is rewarding and on terms that fit our life stage.

You’re an experienced professional with two + decades of experience in a role that loosely fits your college background. The job isn’t perfect, but you like the company, and the pay isn’t bad. And there are those four weeks of vacation every year.

Your responsibility for college support wraps up soon, and you feel a creeping sense of “What’s next?” in life. Your job as a parent is done. You know you have some flexibility in the future, and the idea of shifting gears to something that revives your passion for your work is motivating. However, you don’t want to do anything dumb and jeopardize your future. You’re also not sure what your choice would be. A snorkel and dive shop on the beach sounds great. Nice fantasy. It’s time to get back to your day job.

Although your situation might not fit that one identically, chances are you can adjust the plot a bit and describe yours. You want to make a change. You’re not sure what you want to do. You like eating and paying bills, and you don’t want to risk it all. But there’s this lingering desire to do something different…

Your perception is that a change would be risky. Newsflash: so is staying put. The world has shown in the past few years that no job is truly “safe.” We’re all one announcement, merger, market crash, or pandemic away from being truly on our own. Certainly, a change feels risky.

Here’s how the Career Reinvent Framework earns its keep

Let’s review the stages of the framework and what’s involved with each:

Stage 1—Determination

In this stage, you look carefully at what’s right for you. Stay the course? Pursue a like-kind job? Do something new in your current company? Or pursue a more radical pivot or shift?

I help people along in their thinking with an exercise built around flavors of ice cream. I offer up a dozen or so “flavors” of career change, and they are free to pick, choose, combine, or even customize their flavors. From hanging out a shingle to shifting industries, pursing a new vocation or even reinventing inside your present organization, there are a wide variety of flavors to draw from with your project. At this early stage, most people choose more than one flavor. One client proudly exclaimed, “I have an ice cream sundae.”

Importantly, no one needs to know the final flavor or selection at this stage. We’re just priming the pump and getting you thinking.

Stage 2—Self-Discovery

From long practice, I’ve concluded it’s imperative to tune in to you as part of designing your “next” in your career. The first exercise involves reaching out to past colleagues (peers, bosses, team members and asking two questions:

When we worked together, what did you see I was particularly good at?
How did I affect you?

The feedback is fascinating. It’s incredible how others see things we don’t see in ourselves. Question one always yields some surprises, and question two is profoundly powerful as individuals describe how you impacted them at different stages of their careers.

The second exercise in this phase focuses on you thinking through and writing your “Best-Self” moments—those moments in time when you’ve been your best as a professional and human. The situation, your role, and the type of people you were around are all germane here. You learn a lot about yourself when you explore these best-self moments. And, there’s a certain amount of goodness in designing your career around roles/situations where you are at your best.

Finally, I encourage individuals to investigate their backstories for clues to interests and sources of inspiration. I’m convinced many of us understood what we were intended to do earlier in our lives. The challenges of adulting tend to get in the way of those earlier dreams.

Here’s the catch with this stage and all the above work—typically completed in about a week. It doesn’t contain any answers, just pointers and clues. The insights here feed your idea list in the next stage.

Stage 3: Exploration

I love this stage. It starts out challenging you to go wide and long with divergent thinking for possible ideas for your next and ends up challenging you to converge around a few filtered ideas.

The idea stage involves building your Big Idea List (B.I.L.). Think sticky notes on a wall or the digital equivalent. These are unfiltered ideas, no matter how silly, outdated, or unrealistic they seem.

A childhood dream of being an astronaut? Put it on the list with a twist.

One client mentioned he always wanted to be an astronaut. However, at 50-something, that rocket has probably blasted off. But, something interesting happened on the way to 2023: a commercial space industry emerged. He’s an I.T. professional, and it turns out there’s a huge demand in the burgeoning space market (think: SpaceX) for I.T. professionals. The label: “I.T. Professional for a Space Company” went on his B.I.L.

Creating your Career and Life-Stage Filters

Eventually, after parsing, jumping, building, and adding to the B.I.L., it’s time to add some rigor to the process. This is where we define your career and life-stage filters—those items essential to you at this stage of your life and career. Consider income needs, geographic location, fit with your values, leverage your skills, etc.

This exercise involves developing a multi-variate decision matrix, a fancy phrase for weighting the filters. While assessing weighting and down-selecting to the right filters is subjective, the exercise allows the individual to effectively move all of the ideas from the B.I.L. through your filter and down-select to a few candidate ideas that fit your life stage. That was a gross simplification of a process and series of discussions that are really powerful for assessing what’s right for you in your “next” career.

Now, it’s time to design an exploration plan for these candidate ideas and use the findings to further down-select to one or two candidate ideas ripe for experimentation. A good exploration plan gets you off the computer screen and out interacting with people in your targeted areas. Primary research beats secondary every time.

Stage 4: Experimentation

If you always wanted to run a hot dog stand before investing your life savings, getting a job at one for a week or two might be a good idea, and see if the romance matches the reality. This is one example of an experiment.

Designing intelligent experiments to evaluate your idea(s) is challenging and essential. From going on interviews in a new industry to working a side hustle to test an idea, it’s imperative to experiment to reduce risk.

Subsequently, at some point, the experiment either fails or succeeds. In the case it fails, you return to your B.I.L. and filtered ideas and tee up the next one for investigation. However, if it succeeds, it’s decision time. If the answer is, “Let’s go!” you move to the next stage.

Stage 5: Preparation

Again, since this framework is all about risk minimization, you get to decide when you want to shift and what you need to have in place at that time. Preparation is about business planning and building your project plan. This includes identifying critical success factors and risks and how to mitigate them. Everyone shifts at their own pace; if your timeframe is two months or two years, you design accordingly.

Stage 6: Launch

Depending upon what you choose to do, this is “Go time.” If you are launching a business or hanging out a shingle as a consultant, it’s important to plan a launch that lets your target audience know you are open and ready to serve.

The Bottom Line for Now—It’s work, but it helps you design and de-risk your career shift

Working through the Career Reinvent Framework is some of the best work you’ll ever do. After all, it’s all about you. From beginning to end, the process and exercises challenge you to gain insights, identify life factors essential to you, prioritize, experiment, and, as needed, do it again. While there are always risks you can’t completely eliminate, the process and tools help reduce them to a dull roar. You can focus on the remaining risks and mitigating or managing them as you embark on your next career adventure.