The tech party is over, and the hangover is here.
What can you do about your existential crisis and find your next career?
The last three years have been a wake-up call for people part of an industry that deemed itself as the forefront of ways of working, innovation, and perk-filled organizational culture.
A big slice of tech workers - PMs, Designers, Engineers, Recruiters…. - are facing the existential crisis that came from the disillusion of the tech world. How to proceed from there can feel overwhelming; too many are even impossible to imagine a future beyond what they until here they lived.
Covid allowed many people to have a pocket of time to take stock of life, live a different lifestyle, and realize there’s more to life than a tech career. It showed how little companies cared about their workers and how self-serving executives can be.
Away from the office, being more efficient than ever, people had a taste of the authentic culture of the companies they worked at and its organizational hypocrisy.
Soon after came the many waves - The Great Resignation, The Great Reset, and The Great Return. They came and went as fast as waves at a beach. Hard to even keep track of them all. Power dynamics change quicker than ever.
Then came the layoffs, the results of poor management, short-sighted strategies, and pure social contagion. Adding the way many companies dealt with them to rampant burnout, mistrust in leadership, and a failure as an industry to show itself resilient, respectful, and solution-oriented.
The result of all this is a workforce (or part of it) who cannot believe anymore in how things have been running. They lost trust in executive and leadership teams. They don’t feel companies and their cultures are honest. They are tired of fighting irrelevant strategic fights. Apart from the golden handcuffs, they find it hard to justify staying and putting up with all this.
There’s an ongoing existential crisis, like a big hangover after a good night at the party - when you look back with a headache, what happened yesterday looks no fun anymore, and it’s hard to jump out of bed to go and find yourself an aspirin.
A problem surfacing recently is the “Where I go from here?”. Working for such an intense, emotional, perk-filled, innovative-looking, well-paid industry-like tech left little room to reflect and consider other options.
In a fast-paced environment, everyone seems to be doing what they love the most and getting a better lifestyle out of it. At the same time, social status rises is easy to forget that everything comes to an end and that, in reality, it doesn’t feel as good as we think it does.
As a result, many of us didn’t think about alternative futures for ourselves. And many of us are now struggling with how to proceed from here.
If you are feeling this, you are not alone. You, myself, and many others are going through this. It can feel scary and daunting, but as usual, there are ways to move forward.
Get to know yourself again.
Understand how you think and decide.
Name what energizes and motivates you.
Find what setups and environments have a positive impact on you.
Create scenarios and explore each of them.
Have fun experimenting things out.
Make a plan and start building a new reality.
1- Get to know yourself, again
Our careers can be such time and emotionally consuming that they leave little room for reflection or seriously thinking about alternative futures. When we feel the need for change, we might jump into solution mode asap to relieve the current situation.
Before jumping into the next thing, connecting with ourselves is the first crucial step. To remind us who we are beyond this career, what we care about, and what we miss.
Connecting with yourself again in a playful way is the ground where new things can sprout.
2- Understand how you think and decide
Changing careers is all about decisions. The decision of what to go for, where to go, why, and how to go about it. Understand how we make decisions. Be clear about the thought processes, the narratives we have about ourselves, and the hidden social conventions or industry expectations.
The clearer you are in your thinking and the reasons why you think the way you think will contribute to a better decision-making process and, eventually, better and more informed decisions.
You might even make what comes to be the wrong decision in the long run, but you will know exactly why you did it at a certain point and that you entered it consciously.
This will help you learn faster and feel more confident.
3- Name what energises and motivates you
A no-brainer, but more complex than it looks. Discovering what energizes and motivates us takes more thought than we realize. We often associate that with tasks or specific things, but those are just a means to an end to satisfy some need. Understanding what needs we are meeting with those things will reinforce why we intentionally do them - increasing their power and opening the doors to new things that can help.
In the context of changing careers, they will inform and inspire future career options. It will help you identify which careers and jobs offer you those things. It’s all about creating opportunities that align with yourself.
4- Find what setups and environments have a positive impact on you.
Humans and plants have a lot in common. Unless you are a cactus. Jokes aside, we are deeply affected by our surroundings and the environments where we are. Like plants, humans need nurturing environments that contribute to their well-being and growth.
Like plants, each has different needs, and they thrive differently depending on where they are. Some need lots of Sun and little water, while others need lots of shade and specific amounts of water and cannot share the same pot.
Understanding which environments you thrive in and contribute to your well-being and optimal work is crucial to help you define your next career step.
In some cases, it might not be possible to go for a particular career because the environment and setups where they happen are different from where you thrive. Understanding the setups that work for you can open new career possibilities by considering which careers offer those environments.
There’s a difference between the job itself and in which setup that job happens. It will further help to reduce the options and keep you focused on what’s best for you.
5- Create scenarios and explore each of them
As you identified what motivates and energizes you, the setups where you thrive, you started to create options for future careers. Now is the time to visualize them and dig deeper.
Explore what each option entails - effort, time, happiness, meaning, money - and all the dimensions you deem essential. By diving more profoundly, you will understand which ones are possible or less probable and where you stand when taking steps toward each of them.
Exploring them in such a way will bring clarity, help you prioritize, help you select and eliminate them intentionally, and make a much more informed decision. Our time is limited, and not everything is possible, knowing why you go for something instead of another thing is a decisive liberating move.
6- Have fun experimenting things out
It’s great to make decisions, but it is even better to make informed ones. While you explore your career change, experimentation is vital. It brings you hands-on experience, which helps you understand how you feel about things when you actually do them.
Experiencing things helps us learn about ourselves and opens our minds to what can be. Experimenting with little to lose is fun and informative. Enjoy the process.
7- Make a plan and start building a new reality
Action! Action follows decisions. Knowing where you are heading is great, but knowing how to go about it and make it a reality is even better. At this stage, you create an action plan - time and steps - to make this new transition a reality.
As transitions go, they can feel overwhelming, and a broke down plan helps you to achieve the success you seek and makes it humanly possible to work towards it and make it real.
If you are considering a career transition, be kind to yourself. Things might take some time, and help might be needed, but you will get there. Transitions are an exciting way to grow and learn about ourselves. Enjoy it as much as you can.
You have more in you than you think.