Identity Shift

For most mid-life professionals, the route to career reinvention is a well-marked path that's lit with a slightly spiritual glow. Just check the career section at your local bookstore. It's heavy with tomes promising to help you find your mission in life, urging you to "do what you are," and vowing to teach you the "art of possibility." What's more, a whole industry of career coaches, motivational speakers, and worksheet-heavy seminars has grown up to guide seekers in their quest for a new beginning. Problem is, much of what those books and gurus have to say is plain wrong, says Herminia Ibarra, chaired professor of organizational behavior at the French business school Insead. Rather than bringing about true career change, she says, their advice too often leads to career paralysis.

A former Harvard Business School professor, Ibarra is the author of Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), a book that details her three-year study of approaches to career change. Ibarra's findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom on how to pull off a feat that is difficult even in the best of times, let alone in a rotten job market.

What's wrong with conventional career advice?

People whose first career came about in the usual way--through some combination of economic opportunity, parental prodding, and happenstance--often resolve to make their second act a more deliberate, thoughtful choice. Most advice aimed at these folks is designed to help them discover their "one true self"--the perfect career that will somehow marry inner longings with a livable wage.

That quest generally begins introspectively. It may start with something as simple as digging out that old dog-eared copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? and evolve into a more rigorous process involving self-assessment tests that are designed to gauge interests and values. With those results in hand, the career changer identifies a job in which his enthusiasms can be coupled with his experience. Next, he consults friends, family, and colleagues for leads. Finally, with luck and perseverance, he finds a job that dovetails with what his research has turned up on his own abilities and his professed passion. The theory is that we must discover what we want to do before we can act.

That "plan and implement" model, however, has several problems, according to Ibarra. First, it's backward-looking, rather than forward-looking. "When it comes to changing careers, people can say what they don't like about what they're doing, but they have a very, very hard time defining what they'd rather do instead," she says. "You don't know what would be more exciting and more interesting, and you can't find that out retrospectively because it's not in your history."

In this model, career change is also a one-shot deal: Decide on a new career, and execute. The hard work is in the long process of identifying the next big thing. If that career change doesn't work out, you're back to square one.

Finally, the conventional approach assumes that there's one immutable thing that a person should do with his or her life, and the goal is to discover that calling and act on it. While it's true that some people have a true vocation--to be a teacher, a doctor, a painter, a writer--most could find many careers rewarding. What's more, those possibilities change with time and experience, so what might have felt like the ideal career at 22 (a rock star or a major-league pitcher), will likely have morphed into something quite different by the time you're 35 (unless you're Mick Jagger or Randy Johnson).

Figuring out how to bump into your next career

Ibarra proposes a different model, a "test and learn" approach in which action trumps introspection. It's an admittedly crooked path: Knowing what you want to do comes from experimenting with various possibilities. In this strategy, the goal is to try on alternative work identities to find the most satisfying fit, and choices are constantly refined as the process evolves. This method has several advantages. The career changer acquires a tangible sense of the kinds of tasks a new field might involve and has a chance to get to know the types of people who would be colleagues. The idea is to ground the fantasy of a certain career in reality before making the high-stakes leap into that new field. "The only thing that can help you figure out your next career is bumping into it," Ibarra says. "So the whole process can be distilled to this: What maximizes the chances that you'll encounter it, then recognize it as a real possibility and develop it?"

Ibarra has identified the following three practices that form the basis of this strategy and provide logical underpinnings to what can sometimes seem like a messy and unfocused quest.