Millennials Are Already Itching to Switch Careers

Rebecca Fraser-Thill was an instructor at Bates College for about a decade when she started noticing that, only a few years after graduation, many of her favorite students were already in the midst of a full-bore career crisis.

“What I would often hear is, ‘I’m working in something that I stumbled into, I’m miserable, and I have no idea what to do next,’” she said. To Fraser-Thill, who teaches developmental psychology, it made sense. In early adulthood, we tend to gravitate toward careers modeled on the people closest to us: what adult family members do for a living or what our friends plan to do. Our 20s take us through a process of “individuation,” where we gain a better sense of our own s and talents. That’s when the itch sets in.

Much of the guidance out there on career switching is geared toward midlife transitions—professionals in their 40s or 50s in search of a “second act”—but today, the most common time to change careers is much younger. In a survey of job-seekers aged 34 and under conducted by ZipRecruiter, fewer than half of respondents said they expected to stay in the same industry long-term. Among 25- to 34-year-old workers contacted by the jobs site Monster.com, 26% saw themselves moving into a new career path within the next five years.

Seven years ago, Fraser-Thill began a sideline as a career coach, focusing on helping young professionals transition to more fulfilling work. “The key phrase I see all the time on intake forms is ‘I feel stuck,’” she said. Her method—developed by Jenny Blake, a former career-development program manager at Google and author of the best-selling 2016 book Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One—involves nudging her clients away from daydreaming and toward concrete action. 

The process begins with defining “what ‘great’ looks like” (Which parts of your current role are working for you? What matters to you? What are you really good at?) and then starting an aggressive information-gathering campaign for jobs that match up. “If you think public relations fits you well, find a publicist and have a conversation about what that actually involves,” Fraser-Thill advises. Very often, she said, our initial instinct about the next move is proven wrong.   

Take Nicole Twohy, who started out in marketing at a biotech company. At 25, she was already feeling burned out; the corporate culture wasn’t a good fit, and the work wasn’t creative enough, she said. Twohy thought she might be happier in a role at an advertising agency. “Then I talked to people at the big agencies, and it became clear to me that what I was looking for wasn’t just more creative work, but work I felt more personally connected to,” she said.

After months of research and informational interviews, Twohy ended up enrolling in culinary school. She began teaching cooking classes and styling food for photo shoots. Today, she runs a successful business as a freelance food stylist.

Most of the time, a pivot doesn’t need to be radical to be transformative. One particularly effective way to be happier in your career is through “job crafting,” which means finding ways to change your current role to make better use of your skills and interests. Jack, a 31-year-old client of Fraser-Thill’s who requested anonymity to avoid alerting his employer, was in his late 20s and working as a project manager in the financial services industry when he realized he’d rather spend his time in data science.

“I would have loved to jump ship and start fresh, but I didn’t have enough skills to go do that,” he said. Jack began learning about the burgeoning career path in his free time, first through free online resources, then evening classes. With a year of skills-building under his belt, he volunteered for data science-related projects at his company. “When I got my feet moving in the right direction, the whole dynamic changed,” he said. “I stopped feeling trapped.”

Fraser-Thill favors Jack’s strategy: It’s a good idea to hang on to your current job while you “build a runway” for an eventual transition.

Paul Daniels was in his early 30s when he began to realize that his job as a commodities trader wasn’t going to be the right fit. Daniels said he wanted to do something related to cycling—his lifelong passion. But rather than make a sudden leap, he took a much more cautious approach. He spent five years building a network within the cycling world, testing out ideas and squirreling away enough money to give himself a financial cushion.

“I probably wrote a dozen business plans,” Daniels, now 38, recalled, before landing on the founding team of Princeton CarbonWorks, a maker of high-end carbon-fiber bicycle wheels. The new role allows him to marry research skills he developed as a trader with a more people-oriented role as the face of the brand.

Daniels’s shift is exactly what most of us envision when we think of career pivots: trading a strait-laced corporate gig for something flashier and fun. But Jay Liddell, the co-founder of Bleeker, which provides career guidance to high-performing professionals, said he spends a lot of his time encouraging clients to look past their passions and skills, and to think in terms of what he calls their “essential human capabilities.” He cites key questions young professionals should be asking themselves: How analytical am I? How well do I collaborate? How do I approach challenges?

That’s the kind of thinking that guided Shakirah Simley from a career in food to local politics. At 32, Simley had done everything from running her own jam company to working in restaurants and speaking at industry conferences. But she realized that her common denominator wasn’t food so much as it was social justice.

“In my work, I’ve always been an organizer,” Simley said. “I want to work at intersections and I want to build movements, and I realized to do more of that, I need to work in politics.” Last year, Simley began work as a legislative aide for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.  

Liddell also stressed that younger professionals approaching a career pivot—even a major one—ought not to think of it as a one-time “do-over” but as part of a new type of professional path in which the only constant will be change. Today’s workers are less loyal to individual companies; average job tenure is just four years. Liddell said that, in the future, the most successful employees will move in and out of roles and industries throughout their working lives.

“Your next job is one stop in a journey that will include many,” he said. “The era of the lifer is over. We’re living in the era of the portfolio builder.”

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.