Are you limiting your options by sticking to what you know?
One of the things I hear a lot from women who are unhappy at work is:
“But this is what I’ve always done.”
They might have spent 15 or 20 years working in marketing, HR, finance, education, communications or the public sector. They know they don’t particularly want to keep doing it, but when they start thinking about what could come next, they immediately look for another version of the same job.
I get it. When you’ve spent years building up experience in a particular field, it can feel wasteful, even slightly ridiculous, to consider doing something different.
You know how your industry works. You’ve built up contacts. You have a CV full of relevant experience. You know what jobs you could realistically apply for. It’s the easy option.
So when you start looking at your options, the obvious question becomes:
“What else could I do with my experience?”
But I think there’s a better question:
“What else could I do with everything I’ve learned?”
Because those are two very different things.
Your experience is bigger than your job title
We have a tendency to describe ourselves by the jobs we’ve done.
“I’m a teacher.”
“I work in marketing.”
“I’m an HR manager.”
“I’ve always worked in financial services.”
But your job title only tells part of the story.
Think about what you actually do.
Perhaps you’re brilliant at dealing with difficult people. You can take complicated information and make it understandable. You know how to organise projects, bring people together, spot problems before they happen, persuade people, manage budgets, write, present, teach, negotiate or make decisions under pressure.
Those abilities don’t belong to your industry. They belong to you. And they can potentially be used in all sorts of different ways.
The longer you’ve done something, the smaller your world can start to look
There’s a strange thing that can happen after 20 or 30 years of working. You have more experience than you’ve ever had, yet you can actually start to see fewer possibilities.
At 25, you might have considered all sorts of careers.
At 50, you type your current job title into a recruitment website and look at jobs that are essentially variations of the one you already have.
And if none of them appeal, it can leave you thinking:
“There’s nothing else I can do.”
But perhaps there’s nothing else you want to do within the box you’re currently looking in.
That’s different.
You don't have to throw everything away
Changing direction doesn't necessarily mean starting again from the bottom. And it doesn't have to mean dramatically resigning tomorrow and retraining as something completely unrelated. There’s a huge amount of space between staying exactly where you are and starting your working life from scratch. You might take your skills into a different sector. You might move from a large organisation to a smaller one. You might become freelance or self-employed. You might reduce your hours in one area while you build something else. You might use one particular part of your experience that you’ve always enjoyed and leave the rest behind.
Sometimes the next step isn't a completely new career. It’s just a different way of using what you already know.
Start with the life you want now
This is the bit I think we often miss. Instead of starting with “What jobs am I qualified for?”, start by thinking about what you actually want your working life to look like.
What hours do you want to work?
How much flexibility do you need?
Do you want responsibility, or have you had enough of it?
Do you want to work from home, be around people, travel, work independently or be part of a team?
What kind of work gives you energy?
And what are you completely fed up with?
Your answers might be very different now from the answers you would have given 10 or 20 years ago.
Your past doesn't have to decide your future
I think this is particularly important in our 40s and 50s because we can become very focused on protecting what we've built up: our experience, seniority, salary and professional identity. Those things matter. But they can also become the very things that keep us stuck. You don't have to disregard the last 20 years of your career. But you don't have to repeat them either.
Your experience is something you can take with you, not something that has to keep you where you are. So if you're looking at your working life and thinking, “I don't want to do this for another ten or fifteen years,” don't immediately limit yourself to jobs that look like the one you already have.
Take the walls of the box away for a moment. Instead of asking: “What else can someone like me do?” Try asking: “What would I like my working life to look like now and which parts of everything I've learned could help me create it?”
You might have more options than you think.
