The word ‘career’ can be daunting. It takes an unspeakable amount of time and effort to properly build one. Conversely, the words ‘career shift’ evoke hope, especially if you feel stuck in an unfulfilling profession or you can’t stop fantasizing about quitting your job and doing what you love. But considering a career shift is difficult and intimidating. Where does one even start?
Although answering them with absolute certainty might be impossible, thinking about the following questions will help you kick off the lengthy thinking process that will ultimately decide whether or not you should venture into that new dream work life.
The questions flow from basic economic principles to psychological research with the aim of boosting your awareness of some of the factors that you may overlook but that influence whether your major change of course will make you happy.
What is it exactly that you want to do?
You do not want to transition into a new career path only to feel misplaced or hopeless within it. Observe the details of all the different titles in your target career and think deeply about which of them you want to hold. If the gig you desire is not easily reachable, which ones will you hold first? Are you okay with them? Would you enjoy them or would you only endure them as a stepping stone to the job you deem ideal for you? And from there, how is the transition made to that job (or jobs) you yearn for and how long do they take?
Even when in the right career, your new profession may take you places you never wanted to go and have you commit to contracts at companies where you never wanted to work.
That’s why the connections and discrepancies between the day labor you might have to undertake to make a living and your dream job (or jobs) you’re considering transitioning to must be laid out as clearly as possible. This essential research will become a lot easier if you know exactly what you want to do and how you can get to doing it.
How good are you at what you want to do?
After knowing what you want to do, the most natural thing is to start assessing how good you are at it. And, formal qualifications and certificates aside, this is a lot easier said than done. The first obstacle in evaluating your skills could be, you.
Back in 1995, a person robbed two banks after he covered his face in lemon juice. Thinking it would make his face invisible (because it is used to make invisible ink) to surveillance cameras, he was surprised when he finally got arrested. This man alerted psychologist David Dunning and consequently, his graduate student Justin Kruger, to a discovery they later termed the Dunning-Kruger effect.
What they discovered was simple: incompetent people tend to overestimate their competence.They even titled it ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’.
The study detailed that even if we’re not as ignorant as the bank robber with juice all over his face, we’re still prone to overvalue ourselves, especially if we’re incompetent.
To avoid basing your decision to shift careers on this illusion, make sure your assessment of your skills is not solely based your own evaluation. If you, however, do not possess the skills prerequisite to that new career path, you should probably consider calculating the opportunity cost of acquiring them.
Have you calculated the opportunity cost yet?
It is difficult to calculate the cost of leaving a career for another, especially if you try to project these calculations into the unpredictable future. If you take all the different aspects of your work and your life in it, you will find that it is subjective and that it changes over time. But determining it is worthwhile.
Opportunity cost is the cost of what you give up when choosing one thing amongst many alternatives. What is the opportunity cost of going from career A to career X? How much exactly are you giving up? And is it worth what you expect in return?
All the time, effort and money you’ve spent on education, experience and the development of skills in career A could lead you to potential career paths. These paths have their own salaries, benefits, job security, working hours, etc. If you abandon career A – aside from knowledge, skills, and qualifications that are transferable to career X – you must bid farewell to all that. It sounds dramatic because it is, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have good reasons for it. These reasons are tailored to each and every one of us and will stem from who we are, what circumstances we live under and how we prioritize the different aspects of our lives. When you compare the opportunity cost of staying versus leaving, how much is doing something you love worth it?
Maybe the increased job satisfaction and the significantly improved job performance you expect and hope to realize in career X are enough for you to dive into it head first, or maybe career X has an easily attainable starting salary – which is higher than yours in career A – and you already have the skills to get it. In any case, calculating the opportunity cost will at least significantly diminish your chances of feeling regretful for making the decision after you’ve made it and, at most, help you assess your priorities and make your next career move a better, financially sound investment in your work life.
Is the Sunk Cost Fallacy affecting your decision?
The sunk cost fallacy is about not knowing when to let go. Would it be a good idea to continue pursuing something that is no longer doing us any good just because we’ve already invested a lot of time and money in it? Of course it wouldn’t.
Sunk cost is unrecoverable cost; it’s what you’ve already spent. The sunk cost fallacy or effect occurs when we stick to something that is no longer beneficial to us because of how much we’ve invested in it. Worryingly enough, there is now evidence that we tend to succumb to this error in judgement even when we weren’t the bearers of the sunk cost.
When calculating the opportunity cost of departing from the career you’ve invested in to pursue another, make sure that this tendency to overvalue what you’ve already invested in doesn’t cloud your judgement.
