Take advantage of the lock-down to rethink your career

Today’s webinar was with my colleague, Professor Herminia Ibarra, speaking on the topic: Taking advantage of the Coronavirus disruption to rethink your career.  Building on her many decades of research on leadership and career transitions, she gave us some fascinating insights into the unique situation we all find ourselves in, in terms of how we make sense of our professional identities, and what types of career steps we might take in the months and years ahead. I encourage you to watch the video recording which will be posted in the next couple of days on the London Business School website, www.london.edu/pandemic-webinars. For now, here are some of her key points.

Lockdown is a time to take stock.  While today’s audience wasn’t in any way representative of the workforce as a whole, it was interesting to see how many of the 2,500+ attendees were pondering changes to their careers – 25% were in the process of transitioning, 48% were actively considering doing so, and only 14% were fully content in their current careers.  As Herminia observed, there is something about an enforced break in our day-to-day routines that causes us to reflect and re-evaluate.

Changes afoot in the gig economy. One of the big business trends in recent decades has been the growing numbers of freelance workers – the so-called gig economy – ranging from Deliveroo drivers through plumbers and electricians to professional coaches and consultants. From a corporate perspective, having freelancers as ‘swing producers’ helps enormously in a downturn, but clearly the costs are then borne by those individuals. And as we have seen, national governments are taking very different approaches in how much support they provide to such individuals in tough times. Once we are through this crisis, we are going to see freelancers re-evaluating their choices, and we are going to see governments rethinking their own policies and laws on how to get the most of, and how to support, this contingent workforce.

Have the courage to experiment with multiple possible selves.  The heart of Herminia’s talk was the notion that we rarely know where we want to end up as we go through a career transition, even though we know we are not happy with the status quo. The way forward is to experiment with a number of different projects, activities, ways of working and so, to figure out what our possible “future self” might be. This process is painful and messy, and often takes 2-3 years in her experience. She gave some useful guidance in the talk about how we should handle such a transitional process.

Getting the most from the crisis. The audience were asked what benefits they thought living in lockdown was providing them, in terms of career transitions. The top two answers: 62% said it was providing opportunities to reflect and take stock, 50% said it was opening up new opportunities (people could say yes to multiple options). Herminia reaffirmed for everyone the point that ‘time off’ is not actually wasted time. She offered a great quote from William Bridges; We need not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out at turning points in our lives for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of our everyday existence. In the apparently aimless activity of our time alone, we are doing important inner business.

The downside of lockdown. In terms of how the current situation is hindering us in our career transitions, 52% of the audience said it is increasing their stress levels, 40% said they are less able to experiment because of financial risks, 36% saw fewer viable options, and 33% felt it was harder to network. These are all valid points of course, and Herminia offered some advice on what we can still do to help ourselves despite the fewer degrees of freedom we have. For example, she mentioned the value of re-establishing contact with ‘dormant ties’ – people we know well but have lost touch with – as sources of insight and advice.