When Should You Change Careers? Listen for the Pull, Not Just the Push
Updated: 2 days ago
A bad boss, a missed promotion, a Sunday night dread that finally tips over into action. That is how people expect the decision to change careers to announce itself. In my experience, that is not usually how it works. The loud moments get the attention, but the signal that matters is usually quieter, and it shows up long before anyone consciously decides anything.
Two forces drive almost every career change. One is the push, the frustration with what you have now. The other is the pull, the interest in something else that keeps coming back however often you set it aside. The push tells you something is wrong. Only the pull tells you where to go, and in my experience it is the one people ignore the longest.
Listen to How You Talk About Your Work
I have sat across from enough professionals to know that the content of what someone says matters less than how often they say it. A client will mention their workload once, then twice, then start every single conversation with it, unprompted. That repetition tells me a great deal. The issue has stopped being a passing complaint and become the lens through which they see their whole working life.
So before you decide anything, listen to how you talk about your work. Notice what you keep coming back to with friends, with family and in your own head on the drive home. A single bad week tells you little, because everyone has those. A complaint that follows you across months, projects and even teams tells you a great deal more.
This matters because career decisions are expensive to get wrong, in money, in time and in confidence. Yet people often make them at the point of maximum frustration, which is when judgement is least reliable. Treat a temporary problem as a career problem and you may leave work you would otherwise have loved over what was only a bad six months. Treat a lasting misfit as temporary and you can spend years managing symptoms that were never going to clear.
Frustrated or Outgrown?
I meet one kind of professional often. They have built strong skills and confidence in their role, and somewhere along the way something has changed in how they talk about it. You can hear an urgency in the way they describe the ceiling above them, even when nobody else in the organisation has noticed a ceiling exists.
That urgency is not impatience. Someone who has outgrown a role describes their work quite differently from someone who is frustrated by it. The frustrated person talks about what is wrong with the job. The person who has outgrown it talks about what the job can no longer give them. The difference is small, but once you know to listen for it, you will hear it everywhere.
The two call for different responses. Frustration can often be fixed where you are, through a different manager, clearer boundaries or a change of team. Outgrowing a role usually cannot, because the problem is not that something is going wrong. It is that the work has stopped asking enough of you, and no amount of tidying up around the edges will change that.
When Something Keeps Pulling You
I know the pull well, because it is how I ended up in this work. Years ago I spent around eighteen months in the health service, doing the paperwork in a home help office. To be honest, I was a bit bored. I needed something with more engagement, so I started applying for jobs while doing an HR course alongside. I went for an HR interview and did not get it, but I was shortlisted and placed on a waiting list, and a post came up in the training department as a training administrator. I thought it would do, because there would be a bit more variety in it.
Working there, I found myself fascinated by the trainers. I was drawn to doing what they did, even though I had never delivered any training at all. By my fourth year, the pull was getting really strong, and I could see two options clearly. I could stay doing what I was doing and not really go anywhere, or I could challenge it. I decided to challenge it, and I applied for a whole range of roles.
I was fortunate with the timing. A government employment programme was recruiting heavily, and I got a front-facing role delivering training. Six weeks after I started, I delivered my first course, which ran for ten days. I was a wee bit gobsmacked, but I did it, and I went on delivering training for years afterwards across different organisations. Training is still part of what I offer through my business today. The moment in a workshop when everything comes together and people start to engage is still the part of the work I enjoy most.
The lesson I take from it is simple. If something keeps pulling you, take it seriously. The pull did not go away in four years of administration, and I am glad I listened to it instead of waiting for it to fade. Nothing about the move was certain, and I had no experience to point to. But the interest itself was evidence, and acting on it was the only way to find out what it meant.
LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report found that learners who set career goals engaged with learning four times more than those who did not, based on its research tracking learners over three months. The research measured how much people engaged with learning rather than the outcome of any career move, but the gap between the two groups is large enough to take seriously.
That figure fits what I see. A named direction creates movement in a way that general dissatisfaction never does. Once you admit what is pulling you, you start learning about it, talking to people who do it and building evidence. Until you name it, the energy goes into complaining about what you have rather than moving towards anything.
How to Know When to Change Careers, Not Just Jobs
This is the distinction I return to with almost every client. If the underlying work still suits your strengths but the current environment does not, changing jobs may solve the problem entirely. A different employer, sector or level of responsibility can restore the fit without a full change of direction. If the work itself is the source of the strain, a new employer will only delay the same conversation.
One question cuts through a lot of the noise. If an ideal version of your current job landed on your desk tomorrow, with a good manager, a sensible workload and a fair salary, would you actually want it? If the answer is yes, you are probably looking at a job change. If the answer is still no, it is probably a career change, and switching companies will not resolve it. I look at this question for people later in their careers in Changing Careers After 40.
Change around you can reveal a misfit rather than create one. I have worked with professionals who were settled in a role for years until new management or new systems arrived, and then seemed to lose their footing almost overnight. What usually happens is that the change removes whatever had been compensating for a fit that was already fragile. A supportive manager or a familiar process can mask a poor fit for a long time, and when it goes, what was always slightly wrong becomes impossible to ignore.
When Two Options Both Look Reasonable
The hardest decisions are not between a good option and a bad one. They are between two options that could both work. In that situation, stop asking which one is best in general. Ask which one makes better use of your strengths day to day, where your judgement will carry weight, and where you are likely to spend more time explaining yourself than doing the work. It is hard to answer those questions well if you cannot see clearly what you bring, which I explore in Why You Can’t Make a Good Career Decision Until You See Yourself Clearly.
Timing matters as much as fit. One option might be right eventually but not yet, while another might not be your long-term move but could give you the experience that makes the next decision far easier. Careers are built in sequence, and you do not have to solve everything in one move. If one of your options involves working for yourself, the questions are different again, and I set them out in Should You Go Self-Employed?
People also ask whether to leave before the next move is lined up. Sometimes that is the right call, because staying is costing you more than the uncertainty would. Other times it is a way of escaping a feeling, and you land somewhere worse because you decided in a rush. Think carefully about whether you can afford the gap, and about what you would do with the time that you cannot do while still in your job.
A Wrong Turn Does Less Damage Than You Think
People often treat a career move as though getting it wrong would ruin everything. A move that does not work out usually does far less damage than people fear. It adds a short chapter, not a life sentence. You may find the new work does not suit you either, and that is not failure. It is information you could only have gathered by acting.
What does lasting damage, in my experience, is staying still for years with a pull you never tested. The professionals who handle this well do not act on impulse, but they do not wait for certainty either. They talk to people already doing the work, test it through short projects, shadowing or side work, and build evidence before they commit. Every profession looks cleaner from a distance, and that distance is where poor decisions get made.
A path with a few turns in it also builds something a straight line never does. Each move teaches you how to learn a new environment quickly, how to explain your experience to people who do not share it and how to judge what suits you. Those are skills employers value, and they do not come from staying in one place because it felt safer. You will usually wonder about the road not taken far more than you will regret having tried it.
A Different Question to Ask Yourself
If you are wondering whether it is time to change careers, try setting aside the question of what is wrong with your current job. Ask instead what keeps pulling you, and how long you have been ignoring it. The complaint tells you something needs to change. The pull, if you let yourself listen to it, tells you where to start.
If you would like a structured way to work through that, Career Pathfinder is self-directed, so you can sit down and think through suitable options at your own pace. It is a practical way to turn the pull you have been carrying into a direction you can start testing.
By Paula Donnan
Strength at Work | Better judgement. Stronger leadership. Higher performance.
If this is affecting you, book in for a free 30-minute initial briefing to discuss the way forward.
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