Our content manager, Renee, was talking to one of her friends over the weekend whom is dissatisfied with his career. He is currently an engineer with stable employment, but finds it dull and can see himself being stuck in that job or career for years. The amazing part is that he knows that he would prefer to be working in plumbing or drafting, but feels he should wait before switching over. At the core of this is a fear of leaving what is “safe” and potentially switching into something else.

I want to take this blog post to talk about the reasons why we stay in careers that we aren’t passionate about, and how we can try and use frameworks to help us make decisions when it comes to making the switch. By pulling from other disciplines, hopefully I can present a unique way of looking at how to decide whether switching careers or not is the right thing to do.

The Obvious Reasons

There are many reasons why someone wouldn’t want to transition out of a pre-existing career. Most of it is forced by circumstance. A steady paycheque that is required to pay for a mortgage, car and a family is an impossible thing to give up. This is a topic for a much longer blog post, so I’ll leave it here.

Another reason that people don’t make the leap is - what do they make the leap to? Sokanu was built to help people find their perfect career. This is not limited to people without a career, in fact most people are unhappy in their current career. So just because you are unhappy with your current spot doesn’t mean you have a direction on where you want to go. This is a major issue. 

However! In the example above our engineer knows that he doesn’t like what he is currently in, he knows what he wants to go into, and he has few responsibilities. So why isn’t he making the leap?

What’s Holding Us Back - Psychology

The human brain is an amazing thing, but it can also play tricks on us. Rationally, looking at the situation from above, we can form a basic chart.

We already know that we would be much happier in the career plumber than engineer, as our perceived happiness level shows. So why don’t we make the immediate switch? Why is our brain saying that “we should wait?” It’s because the chart is incomplete. We are missing the “irrational” and economic factors that weigh into this decision. Let’s add those to the chart and look at it again. 

I have added two major factors that weigh into the decision here:

• Salary (both current realized salaries and expected salaries at the end of the career lifecycle)

How “Should” We Approach The Problem?

The first thing we should do is take the various aspects from above and order relative to importance. What is most important to you in life? For me - the order goes something like this:

1. Time
2. Happiness
3. Future Salary
4. Present Salary
5. The Unknown “Gap”

You need to decide what is most important in life. I place time at the top because it is the one thing that we are not in control of. Everything else is manageable by us. Money can always be gained, time can not. 

There is something else we have not considered. It is a term called Opportunity Cost, and it is a simple calculation that takes into account the sacrifice made for a second or other choice. In our case, opportunity cost dictates whether or not we should make this decision. Let’s take a look at our chart again. 

Our Opportunity Cost is a combination of the following (not limited to):

• Skills
• Time
• Foregone Salary
• Increased Stress
• Irrelevant Training/Education

Each time we decide to make the leap, we need to factor in these points. By switching to career A from B, do I:

• have the necessary skills? 
• have the time to dedicate towards this? am I prepared for the length of the process?
• understand that I will not be making a salary during this period?
• have the mental state required to deal with the ups and downs of career changing?
• have the training & education required for the new career? If not - how long will it take me to acquire this? (goes back into time)

—

The problem is quite simple, yet hard to solve. When people think about switching careers, their order of importance goes something like this:

• The “Unknown” Gap
• Present Salary
• Time
• Future Salary
• Happiness

We don’t think about happiness at all because it is hard to measure. We know we aren’t happy in our current career - yet we aren’t positive what the expected happiness in the new career will be. What scares us most is the short term, the stress & discomfort that this “unknown” gap will cause us. “What if I can’t find a job? What’s the best way to update my resume? Where do I look for this job?”

All of those thoughts are short-term. We can solve them in a matter of weeks, not years or decades. Our happiness, however, is going to decrease over time by staying in our current career. But because that is a long term thing, we rarely take it into account.

Put another way - this short term gap triggers our bad psychological tendencies. It makes us emotional rather than rational. Our brain goes through all of the hardship this short term decision will cause, instead of the long term benefits. Do not let it do this to you. Think about the short term as just a step in a long term goal. 

Most of these points only apply if you know what your next career should be, and that it will increase your happiness. I will write another post that talks about what to do if that career is not (yet) known. 

Key Points:

• Remove emotion from the decision. Look at your decision like a graph, plotted out over time
• Place emphasis on long term over short term. Don’t let short term bias dictate your major life decisions
• Calculate the opportunity cost of staying in your current career vs. moving to the new
• Realize the longer you wait, the harder it gets. The cost increases at a rate.
• Time & happiness are your most important metrics. Optimize for these first, and everything else second. 
• It’s your life! Do what is right for you, in your situation, based on the knowledge you have. Try and apply a framework to these decisions. If nothing else, it will help you remove the guesswork from the process.