July 14, 2008
No to speech therapy: thoughts on career change
At an early stage in my career, I thought about quitting journalism. While flirting with the idea of becoming a speech therapist, I also applied to be the assistant to Theodore Zeldin, the historian.
Dr Zeldin is an authority on France and also an offbeat thinker on how to make work more rewarding. During the job interview, he persuaded me to stick with journalism, which he described as “that most privileged of professions” in a recent Lunch with the FT.
He was right and I’m grateful for his advice. But many follow through on the impulse to jack it all in and find a new trade. With such people in mind - particularly those in mid-career - we’ve just published a video lecture on career change by Herminia Ibarra, a professor at Insead.
In it, she stresses the value of experimenting with new identities before launching into a radical reinvention. Want to quit banking? By all means do work experience at a school to see if you like teaching - but maybe try some financial consulting too, just to see if that might also appeal. And while you are at it, talk to people from outside your professional peer group in order to get a fresh perspective. In short: action beats introspection.
None of that was obvious to me when I was thinking of switching careers. I didn’t know much about speech therapy but it seemed a more soulful outlet for someone with an interest in language; Dr Zeldin’s touchy-feely style was also appealing. However, he convinced me that neither speech therapy nor working for him could compete with the diversity of experiences and intellectual stimulation offered by reporting.
I definitely think a lot of people contemplating a career change would benefit from a chat with a wise outsider, particularly those looking to move into a “caring” profession (medicine, teaching, NGOs, speech therapy) after years in a supposedly “selfish” profession (accountancy, law, banking, journalism). Sometimes we just need permission to carry on as we are - or encouragement to develop our existing roles in new ways in order to fill unmet needs.
Adam - you are so right! - career change is one of the most challenging things we can do and it doesn’t matter what stage of life we have got to when we attempt it. In the real world people often feel a sense of frustration and emptiness and know instinctively that what they are doing is, in effect, simply “going through the motions” - the problem is doing something about it. Rarely do people seem to know what the “solution” is - just that there is a problem and that in a real sense makes Herminia Ibarra’s comment largely theoretical. Sure, if teaching is what you think you might want to do - go and try it in a classroom. Trying financial consulting too, which I think is what is being suggested, emphasises my point; the skills and traits required in one are, generally speaking, completely different to those that lead to fulfilment and success in the other. Much better in my experience to put the emphasis into finding out - with committed and understanding professional assistance - what the likely areas of success for you as an individual are likely to be and getting “practical” experience to double check the reconnaissance work you have undertaken at that point certainly makes sound sense. It wasn’t that long ago that people really were left to their own devices; now, thanks to the work of pioneers like Dr Roger Birkman in the U.S, or contemporary “gurus” such as Harvard’s Tal Ben-Shahar, there are some serious and effective tools available to assist people in this process. These are genuine processes based on science and mainstream psychology which have the potential of minimising the risks of choosing the wrong area of activity, whether at the outset, or in later life. Filling unmet needs is indeed the key and cornerstone - identifying with precision what those needs are and the passions that interact with them is the first and fundamental step in career choice or change. As you so correctly point out in many instances it isn’t the career itself that is wrong but the approach to it or even a particular employer within it. Modest “adjustments” are often all it takes to get needs met; in which case there’s no need to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” together with all of the trauma and stress that that implies. Seeing ourselves with true perspective is one of the hardest things to do; in my experience as a consultant it repays the effort a thousand fold.
Posted by: Anthony Broadhead | July 16th, 2008 at 6:58 pm | Report this comment