Want to Change Career But Don’t Know What to Do Next? Start Here
You know something needs to change.
Maybe you’ve been feeling increasingly unfulfilled at work. Perhaps you’ve lost your motivation, you’re dreading Mondays, or you’ve simply reached the point where you can’t imagine doing the same thing for another five or ten years.
So, you’ve started thinking about changing career.
There’s just one fairly significant problem:
You have absolutely no idea what you want to do instead.
If that sounds familiar, you’re definitely not alone. “I know I need a change, but I don’t know what I want to do next” is something I hear regularly from people who come to me for career coaching.
And when you’re an experienced professional with years invested in your career, working out what comes next can feel particularly daunting.
The good news is that you don’t need to have the answer before you start exploring the question.
First, do you actually need a completely new career?
When work isn’t making us happy, it’s easy to jump straight to:
“I need a complete career change.”
But before you start Googling entirely new professions, take a step back.
What specifically isn’t working about your current situation?
Is it the work itself? Your organisation? Your manager? The culture? Lack of progression? Your workload? The hours? Your salary? A lack of purpose? Or has what you want from your career simply changed?
You may discover that you really do want a completely different career.
But you might also realise that you don’t need to throw everything away and start again. A different role, organisation, sector or way of working could give you more of what you’re missing while allowing you to build on everything you’ve already achieved.
Stop asking “What job should I do?”
This is often where people get stuck.
They sit down and try to come up with the answer to one enormous question:
“What should I do with my career?”
Unsurprisingly, their mind goes blank.
Instead, try breaking the question down.
Ask yourself:
What do I want more of in my working life?
Perhaps it’s autonomy, creativity, challenge, connection, flexibility, purpose, progression or better work-life balance.
Then ask:
What do I want less of?
Long hours? Managing people? Office politics? Constant pressure? Sitting behind a desk? Travelling? Working alone?
You’re not trying to identify your perfect job yet. You’re starting to understand what you want your next chapter to look and feel like.
That gives you something much more useful to work with.
Look at what you already have
One of the biggest fears I hear around career change is:
“But I’d have to start all over again.”
Usually, you don’t.
By the time you’re mid-career, you’ve built up years of experience, knowledge, relationships and transferable skills.
The challenge is often that you’ve become so used to using those skills that you no longer recognise their value.
Think beyond your job title.
What are you naturally good at? What do other people come to you for? Which parts of your work give you energy? What problems are you particularly good at solving?
And, just as importantly, which of your strengths do you actually want to keep using?
Being good at something doesn’t mean you have to build the next 20 years of your career around it.
Don’t wait for 100% certainty
This is a big one.
I work with lots of thoughtful, capable people who are very good at analysing things.
Which is useful... until you’re trying to make a career decision.
You research. You make lists. You weigh up every possible outcome. You talk yourself into an idea and then straight back out of it.
And eventually you’re so worried about making the wrong decision that you make no decision at all.
Career clarity rarely arrives as one enormous lightbulb moment.
Often, it develops through action.
Have conversations with people doing work that interests you. Research different sectors. Attend an event. Try something alongside your current role. Explore an idea before deciding whether you want to pursue it.
You don’t need to know exactly where the road ends before you take the first step.
You don’t have to work it all out alone
When you’ve been thinking about the same problem for months, it can be incredibly difficult to see it clearly.
You’re inside your own head, with all your assumptions, fears and “yes, buts...” competing for attention.
Sometimes what you need isn’t somebody to tell you what career you should have.
You need the space to think properly.
That’s one of the things I love most about career coaching.
My role isn’t to hand you the answer. It’s to be your thinking partner: asking questions you may not have asked yourself, helping you recognise patterns, challenging some of the assumptions keeping you stuck and turning all that thinking into practical action.
Because you probably know far more about what you want than you think you do.
Sometimes you just need help untangling it.
Feeling stuck can be the beginning, not the end
If you’ve reached the point where you know you want something to change but have no idea what that change should look like, you don’t need to panic and you don’t need to resign tomorrow.
Start by getting curious.
What isn't working anymore?
What do you want more of?
What matters to you now that perhaps didn't matter five or ten years ago?
And what is one small thing you could do to start exploring what comes next?
You don’t need the whole answer.
You just need somewhere to start.
Feeling stuck in your career and struggling to work out what you want next?
I work with professionals who want greater clarity, confidence and direction in their careers, helping them get out of their heads, make decisions and move forward with a clear plan.
I’m currently taking on a limited number of new 1:1 Career & Leadership Coaching clients for September: