Navigating a late-career change

People change jobs all the time. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the oldest people in the workforce have probably held more than 12 jobs over the course of their lives. Those aren’t just new titles within a firm, they likely include larger career shifts.

With globalization and changes in technology, the need to shift career paths can happen to people even in the last decade of their work lives. I myself have recently moved to the private sector after more than three decades as a university faculty member. If you make a significant career switch, what can you do to ease the adjustment to the new role and make a contribution quickly?

Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know

By the time you get deep into your career, you’ve learned a lot about the world of work. That expertise has helped you navigate many situations and often gave you some insight or wisdom that people newer to the workplace didn’t have. As a result, it can be difficult to be in a situation in which you’re no longer the trusted expert.

Let that go.

Your value at work and your identity does not need to be bound up in knowing everything. You will bring a lot of wisdom to the table (we’ll talk about that in a bit), but it’s okay to have lots of things that are new to you. You might think your colleagues will respect you more if you assert how much you know. In truth, they will appreciate the clarity you can give them around what you don’t know.

On top of that, it’s actually fun—and healthy—to learn new things. Being exposed to new ways of working, new approaches to engaging with the world, and new knowledge is invigorating. As a bonus, when your brain can’t predict everything that’s going to happen next, you lay down lots of new memories, which makes time feel like it’s going slower. At an age where you may feel like your life is rocketing by, that’s valuable.

Listen more than you play

My general advice for starting any new job comes from jazz. If you play jazz, then you’re likely to sit in with new musicians. Despite the temptation to play a lot of notes quickly to establish what you can do, the standard advice is to listen more than you play. That way, you can tailor what you play to the style of what everyone around you is doing.

Similarly, when you make a career pivot, people are going to be bringing perspectives to their work that differ from what you’ve encountered in the past. Even if you were hired to bring some aspect of your expertise to the workplace, you still need to make sure you play it in the style of the people around you. And you won’t be able to do that until you hear from them.

When you start a new job in that career pivot, let everyone else talk first. Resist the urge to toss in your opinion early and often. Even when you hear people saying things you completely disagree with, let the conversation go on. Organizations often do things in a particular way because of an element of their history. Understanding both what people are doing and why will enable you to see any wisdom in their work that may not be obvious. And if you do feel like you want to suggest a change, listening will allow you to attach your suggestions to their reasons for doing what they do.

Lean into your durable skills

When you make a career pivot, you’ll find that there are a certain number of things you had learned to do well that just don’t translate from one sector to another. Most of these skills that have suddenly become useless involve specific tasks that were integral to your old career and not useful in the new one. As a college instructor, I had a lot of facility with the learning management system that students use to access course materials and submit assignments. Those skills are not things I need in my new role.

Instead, the things that translate from one career path to another are more durable skills around problem-solving, critical thinking, interpersonal interactions, and cultural awareness. For example, I recently found myself in a meeting in which I was being asked to comment on a new process to be used to manage a project. Before trying to evaluate the process, I asked a lot of questions about the problem the process was designed to solve. I realized later that I was bringing a broader set of problem-solving strategies to bear on the conversation. So even though I was learning about the business, I was still able to contribute to the evaluation using skills I had already honed.

More generally, when you switch careers, think about the skills that enable you to bring your experience to new situations. Your success in this new path will rest on maximizing the value of those durable skills in the new environment.

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