Member-only story
What I Wish I’d Known When I Made a Drastic Career Change
Eight people who took the plunge share the biggest challenges and surprises of starting over
When Cat Jones left her job at a large health care company to join a small nonprofit, the first moment of culture shock happened before her training even started — because, as the organization’s sole employee, she wouldn’t be having any.
Without any formal process in place for her onboarding (or anyone to implement it), Jones, 30, was left to teach herself everything she needed to know, from donor engagement to graphic design. “I wish I’d done research first, instead of assuming I could do everything from day one,” she says. It wasn’t until she started that Jones realized just how much she didn’t know.
While there are no statistics on how many people make a dramatic career change, most of us hopscotch through our working life to some degree. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor found that the average person changes jobs a dozen times in their career. For anyone making a drastic career change, settling in means learning new things about your goals, your skills, and yourself. Some of those lessons are easy to anticipate; others, like in Jones’ experience, are learned on the fly.
