Reframing career change after 10+ years of experience

Changing careers after building one for 10+ years might sound foolish to most people. But when your work stops feeling like it’s losing the reward, or you’re being pulled towards something else, the itch to change direction is very real. I hear it regularly, particularly from entrepreneurs.

The linear career formula.

The linear career formula: get good at something, specialise, move up, repeat. It works. Until it doesn’t. Linear paths work well for some professions and certain personalities. But more and more people I speak to are curious about what they’re fully capable of. In most career structures, you get promoted for one set of skills and hired for another. Skills like curiosity, creative thinking, and true problem solving often stay on the shelf - not because they aren’t valuable but because the work environment doesn’t always make space for them.

That gap is that you can be genuinely good at your work AND be quietly underutilised by it (sound familiar?)

Stagnation is not a character flaw.

Career stagnation gets treated like a personal (your) problem. As if it’s a sign you’ve lost your edge; but the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs Report found that 44% of core job skills will be disrupted within five years. Feeling out of step isn’t a character flaw - it’s a reasonable response to the changing world of work. For founders and teams navigating fast-moving markets, that’s probably familiar.

Tolerating being a beginner.

The hard part isn’t the decision to change. It’s what comes after. Reskilling after decades in one domain means tolerating being a beginner again. After years as the expert in the room, that’s uncomfortable. You’re not just learning something new. You’re unlearning too. Old habits, old ways of seeing yourself, old definitions of what good looks like. That discomfort is something to live through and come out the other side. If you’re in it, don’t give up … because ….

Everything you built before, still matters…

The one reflection I consistently hear from people who’ve made the change, lived through the growth pains and found footing in the new direction is that: …… everything they built before got them to the next phase. The experience, the pattern recognition, the judgment sharpened over years… all of it transfers. They didn’t feel like they were starting from zero.

Don’t wait to feel ready.

Herminia Ibarra, professor at London Business School, found that successful career changers don’t start with a plan. They start with experiments. Small tests, moves across versus up, new conversations with new people. Korn Ferry calls this learning agility: the ability to learn from experience and apply it somewhere new. The WEF ranks curiosity and lifelong learning among the most valued attributes in the future workforce.

So, turns out the itch to change direction isn’t foolishness at all - the question is what you do with that itch.