The idea of choosing a career can be a little misleading. Many people fall on to a career path, taking the first job they can find after school, college or university – perhaps a temp position that eventually turns permanent. Before they know it, they find they have been in recruitment or sales or finance for a decade. That can be OK – but what if you are deeply unfulfilled in the area you find yourself in?
Luckily, changing careers has become more and more acceptable, as the days of a job for life recede into history. But it can be made difficult if you do not know what you want to do. That’s the dilemma facing 33-year-old Marty Drury, who settled on a carer in psychotherapy after graduating with a degree in English and Theatre Studies.
“I thought I knew vaguely what I wanted to do in broad terms, but not in specific terms,” he admits. “So I decided to start training in psychotherapy and it went from there.”
Having gained the necessary qualifications and established a practice, he quickly became disillusioned with the industry. “I wish somebody had said to me, ‘Forget about what you think you have to do and think about what you want to do’,” he says. “I did an awful lot of things because I thought I had to. I didn’t get clear as to what I wanted to create in my life. I thought, ‘I should be earning this amount, I should be in this career.’”
Drury isn’t unusual, according to Rachel Locke of the National Careers Service. “A lot of people find themselves in roles where they’re not 100% sure that’s what they want to do,” she says. “You can get stuck in a rut and find yourself in a job that pays the bills, but doesn’t give you a sense purpose.”
Locke suggests starting off by thinking about what makes you happy, as well as what you’re good at.
“We have a tool called a skills health check, which is a series of questions designed to understand your skills, interests, personality, and motivation,” she says. “At the end it will generate a report of possible career ideas.”
And there are plenty of other sources of advice and inspiration available, from career coaches who can help identify your key transferable skills (though you’ll usually have to pay for their services), to professional bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing or the Institute of Recruiters, which can provide guidance as to the types of roles available and qualifications needed within a particular industry.
“And don’t underestimate what friends and family have to say,” Locke adds. “The people who are closest to you might be able to give you an insight into the type of person you are, which you can’t see.”
That’s how father-of-two Jonty Joyce, 39, began making his career shift. Having fallen into the social care sector after taking an admin job with his local council in his 20s, he realised that he simply wasn’t gaining as much satisfaction from his career as he’d expected.
“I kept seeing friends on Facebook who were musicians or whatever saying ‘Another day of loving my job, I’m so lucky!’ and I thought, that’s what I want,” he says. “My wife said, ‘There is something you love doing.’ I thought she meant music, but she said, ‘No, not music, I’m talking about gardening.’”
Joyce was a keen amateur gardener, but had never considered making a career out of it. Now he is studying horticulture with the RHS while working part time as a civil enforcement officer with the council’s parking services department to pay the bills. He is also volunteering at a local zoo gardens, and is building up a small number of local gardening clients.
“It gives you both perspectives,” he says. “I wouldn’t like to be fully self-employed, it’s a bit seasonal and there are all the usual pressures of being self-employed, but I like managing myself and liaising with the client. With the zoo it’s much more structured. It’s nice working for an organisation and working for myself and seeing both sides of the picture. That’s what I’d ultimately like to do.”
Volunteering is a great way to test whether a job is going to be suitable for you. “There’s no match for going out and getting hands on experience and seeing if you enjoy something,” says Locke. “Volunteering is something we often advise people to do, or shadowing someone in a particular profession. What you imagine is your dream job may not be all it’s cracked up to be.”
Career coach, Ruth Winden, agrees: “You would never dream of buying a car without test driving it; a lot of people make massive career changes without knowing anything about it.”
It might not be that a complete career change is even necessary. “People think either narrowly, where they are, or wildly different, and nothing in between,” Winden says. “With my clients, I ask, ‘Where is that desire to change coming from?’ Is there something they still enjoy about their role? Is it really the career they have a problem with, or is it the company, their boss? Is it really a career change they want or is it just a job change?”
Researching roles within your current industry might lead you from working as a restaurant chef to teaching on a college catering course, for example, or you could find that simply shifting from the marketing department of a large corporation to that of a small, vibrant startup provides the difference you need.
However minor or major the change, once you have an idea of what you want to do, the key is to start testing it out, rather than getting stuck in what Winden calls “analysis paralysis”, which can come with doing too much research.
“People either see no options or they’re totally overwhelmed and they don’t do anything,” she says. “Don’t spend all your time on researching the ideal career. You need to do the groundwork but don’t underestimate how important it is to talk to people and get some experience. You need a combination of thinking and doing. At some point you really need to get out there and get a taste of it.”
• This article was amended on 7 September 2015 to correct Rachel Locke’s surname
