The days of people working for a single company throughout their careers are largely over. We are increasingly seeing people not just making career changes, but making them more frequently and making bigger changes.
Partly this is because our working lives are getting too long for the old model of learning, working, and then retiring. Ibarra said that the typical ‘mid-career “Aha moment”’ is now less about feeling ‘It’s now or never’ than about ‘I can’t stand doing this for another 30 years’. In addition, technology is changing not only how we do our jobs, but how we research, apply and interview for them.
Big companies, historically the setting for long, single-employer careers, are shrinking, consolidating key functions in small cores and outsourcing everything else – a process Ibarra refers to as ‘Nikefication’. This leaves people with less and less room to change and grow, which is showing in typically very low engagement figures, and a median length of time in any one job of only 4.2 years. So people want to leave, set up on their own, find a job with passion and purpose. They don’t want to do what their parents did or what the company has planned for them.
But, as Ibarra said, this is difficult: ‘In many ways you are on your own. There used to be paths, sequences, clear trajectories. We don’t do that any more. There are more transitions to navigate and you navigate them yourself.’
The key to how to manage those transitions lies in a deeper understanding of identity, networks, and storytelling.
Identity
We all have multiple identities, but our work identity is one of the most important. What we do is part of how other people relate to us; it is how we start a conversation; and it allows people to ‘categorise’ us. Also, because we spend so much time at work, we end up internalising that work identity as a sense of self, which is why losing that identity -- even if voluntarily -- is so painful.
One of the most difficult things is understanding who we are as we are changing. Our identity is partly how we describe ourselves, but it is also a product of how others describe us. And others end up ‘pigeonholing’ us, unable to recognise that we could be something different. As Ibarra said, ‘It is very difficult to be something if no one else thinks that is what you are … Whatever you identify as, if it is not confirmed and endorsed by those around you, it is very hard to hang on to that identity.’
Networks
In the workplace, networks very quickly close in, with almost everyone knowing everyone else. When people are working hard and perhaps also trying to bring up a family it is difficult to put the time in to maintaining and refreshing a wide network. The down side to this is that very close networks reinforce common behaviours and attitudes: they skew ideas of what ‘normal’ is and tie people to their identities within the network.
Ibarra said that this is why ‘One of the best things you can do when seeking to make a transition is to move out to the fringes of your networks. Find weaker ties and new relationships that will give you different perspectives on what is attractive and possible.’
Storytelling
‘We are natural born storytellers,’ said Ibarra, and ‘Identity is a crafted fiction’ based on our backgrounds, what we have done, and the defining moments that shaped us. ‘The more we tell these stories, the more they become us.’
But, as she explained with the story of Margaret Thatcher, who embodied her own vision of the UK’s Conservative Party as the party for hard-workers, whatever their background, and who probably revelled in Mikhail Gorbachev’s description of her as ‘the Iron Lady’. Thatcher, however, ‘became trapped in that persona way beyond the time when it was useful’. Becoming stuck in our own stories is limiting, and makes it difficult to change.
How to change the story
Looked at this way, identity can be an anchor – something that is safe, makes us feel coherent, whole, and authentic. But it is also something that stops us moving on when the time is right.
Ibarra said that a way to disengage this anchor can be to ‘Shift the tense of identity’. Identity is who we’ve been and who we are today, but can also include all the ideas in our heads about who we might become. She described these ‘possible selves’ as ‘a whole cast of characters clamouring for attention: some are what we would like to do, some are what other people expect from us, some are ideals, some fears – the person we hope we don’t become ...’
So if identity is a combination of what we do, the company we keep, and formative events in our lives, the way to create change is to change what we do – take on side projects, do some moonlighting, volunteer for activities that introduce us to new networks and give us the opportunity to practise other identities. Then we can use these new experiences as elements of the plot in a new story.
The discomforts of liminality
Even so, Ibarra warned that change remains difficult. Seldom is it achieved after a single Damascene moment of conversion. Career changes are not linear, they are messy and driven by things that are outside our control.
The transition process – exploring what you want, disengaging from anchoring identities, experimenting with possible selves – always takes longer than anyone anticipates and is hard on individuals and those close to them. An interviewee described is as ‘like living inside a hurricane’.
But Ibarra said it was important to ‘stay with it long enough not to jump to a conclusion and foreclose on something that you don’t really want.’ The important part of a career transition is not getting into a new role, but coming to an understanding of yourself and what is driving you.