What Stays the Same When Your Career Changes?
4 minute read
Career Reflection | What stays with us when work changes | Image by Annie Spratt | Unsplash
Privacy note: Some identifying details have been changed or generalised to protect privacy.
Construction.
Remote operations.
Housekeeping.
Concierge.
Aged care.
If you saw those five things listed on a resume, what would you make of them?
At first glance, perhaps not much.
They cross industries. The workplaces would be very different. So would the tasks, the people and probably the reasons for taking each job.
They might even look like the working lives of several different people.
But they aren't.
They belong to one person.
And recently that got me thinking about something we can easily miss when looking back over a career.
We tend to notice what changed.
Perhaps we should also pay attention to what didn't.
We organise careers by job title
It makes sense that we do.
Job titles, employers and dates are how we describe our work history. They're the things we put on a resume and a LinkedIn profile.
When someone asks what we do, we usually answer with an occupation.
"I'm a teacher."
"I work in construction."
"I'm a nurse."
But an occupation describes the work we're doing at that point in time.
It doesn't necessarily describe everything we're bringing to it.
Look underneath a series of very different jobs and you may find things that have been there for years.
The ability to talk comfortably with different people.
Practical problem-solving.
Staying calm when something unexpected happens.
Working independently.
Noticing what needs doing without always having to be told.
Being someone other people can rely on.
These things don't necessarily belong to an industry.
They belong to the person.
What kept showing up?
That's the question I find interesting.
Not simply:
What did you do?
But:
What kept showing up in the way you did it?
Someone may have used practical judgement on a construction site, then used that same instinct in a completely different environment years later.
Someone who became good at reading situations in one workplace may discover that the same ability helps them work with people somewhere else.
We don't always notice this because, to us, these qualities can feel ordinary.
They're simply how we work.
But change the setting and sometimes their value becomes much easier to see.
The job can change completely while parts of the person remain remarkably consistent.
But we don't just carry things forward
There's another side to this.
Each job can add something too.
A customer-facing role might build confidence dealing with people.
Working independently might show us how much autonomy matters.
A difficult workplace might teach us something important about the environment we don't want to work in again.
A caring role might bring patience or empathy further to the surface.
Some jobs may have been fulfilling.
Others may simply have paid the bills.
Some we may be proud of.
Others we might be quite happy never to do again.
But they're still part of our working story.
Over time, we don't just accumulate jobs.
We accumulate evidence about ourselves.
What we're good at.
What matters to us.
What kinds of people and environments bring out our best.
And sometimes what we're no longer prepared to tolerate.
Starting again isn't the same as starting from zero
This becomes particularly important during career change.
Moving into something unfamiliar can genuinely make you a beginner again.
There may be new terminology.
New systems.
New qualifications.
New expectations.
Perhaps even a completely different professional identity.
That can be uncomfortable.
If you've spent years becoming competent in one field, suddenly being the person who doesn't know can knock your confidence around.
There can also be things you genuinely leave behind.
Status. Familiarity. Technical expertise. Professional networks. Perhaps even part of the identity you've built around what you do.
Career change shouldn't pretend those losses aren't real.
But neither should it ignore everything that comes with you.
Being new to an occupation is not the same as being new to work.
You may have to learn the job.
You don't have to learn yourself from scratch.
Maybe the thread isn't the occupation
Career development theory has long recognised that a career is more than progression within a single occupation. Donald Super, for example, placed greater emphasis on the person developing across a working life, including the different roles and experiences that become part of that career.
That seems particularly relevant when we look again at this working life.
Construction.
Remote operations.
Housekeeping.
Concierge.
Aged care.
Trying to find one occupation that connects them probably isn't very useful.
There may not be one.
But look at the person moving through them and another kind of pattern can become visible.
How did they deal with people?
What problems did others trust them to solve?
What responsibilities did they naturally take on?
When did they seem most comfortable?
What did they carry from one experience into another?
That's a different way of reading a career.
Instead of searching only for a neat occupational progression, we're also looking for continuity in the person.
And perhaps that's why some career histories make more sense when you hear the story than when you simply read the resume.
The resume records the jobs.
The story can reveal the thread connecting them.
Take a moment
Choose three different jobs or work experiences from your own life.
The more different they seem, the better.
For each one, write down just two things:
What did I bring to this work?
What did this work add to me?
Don't worry about making the answers sound impressive.
Look for evidence instead.
Perhaps people regularly came to you when something went wrong.
Perhaps you were good at explaining things.
Perhaps you noticed details other people missed.
Perhaps you enjoyed getting something organised, making someone comfortable, solving something practical or working things out for yourself.
Then look across all three experiences.
What keeps showing up?
You may notice something you're good at.
You may notice something about the way you tend to work.
You may recognise something that matters to you, or something experience has taught you.
Or you may simply notice that a career which looked disconnected on paper has had a thread running through it all along.
That thread doesn't necessarily tell you what job you should do next.
But it might tell you something useful about what you want to take with you when you get there.
Reflection
What stays with you when work changes?
Choose three different work experiences.
For each one, ask:
What did I bring to it?
What did it add to me?
Then look across all three.
What keeps showing up?
Source & Acknowledgement
This reflection was informed in part by the career development work of Donald Super, whose life-span, life-space approach emphasised career development across a person's changing roles and experiences over time.
For readers interested in the theory behind this idea, the National Career Development Association provides a useful overview in Super's Life Span, Life Space Theory.