Most of my clients are genuinely excellent at what they do. That might be flattery, but it’s also true. They’ve been high performers for years, sometimes decades. They’re the people their organizations relied on, the ones who got things done, the ones colleagues came to when something needed to actually work.
And then they try to change fields, and the experience is disorienting in a way they weren’t prepared for.
Not because they stopped being good. Because a pivot search operates by different rules than any search they’ve run before and nobody warned them.
The last time they did this was a very long time ago
Think about how experienced professionals typically move through their careers. They apply for ten jobs, get five interviews, receive two offers, and pick one. That’s a good hit rate. It reflects their track record, their reputation, and the way their name lands in contexts where people already know what it means.
The last time many of them ran a search like that was eight years ago. Twelve. Sometimes twenty. The job market has changed substantially in that time. Their expectations haven’t because they haven’t had reason to update them.
A pivot search is harder than that on two fronts simultaneously: the market is slower than it was the last time they looked, and they’re now an unknown quantity in a field that doesn’t have the context to read them the way their previous one did. The combination of those two things produces a search that feels broken, even when it isn’t.
They’re not getting fewer interviews because they got worse. They’re getting fewer interviews because the market doesn’t know them yet and because they’re asking it to see them differently than it has before.
You Don’t Need Career Answers.You Need Career Support.
A pivot search is a lonely experience
There’s something specific about doing this alone that makes it harder than it needs to be, and it’s not just the tactical gaps. It’s that the experience is genuinely disorienting, and most people around you haven’t been through it.
Your friends and family can be supportive without understanding what’s actually happening. Your former colleagues are in the same field you’re leaving. You’re doing something most people in your life haven’t done (intentionally moving into unfamiliar territory at a stage in your career where you’re used to knowing what you’re doing) and the isolation of that is real.
It’s a little like being pregnant for the first time, or going through menopause. The experience is common enough that there’s plenty of general information about it. But what you actually want and what general information can’t provide is what someone who has been through it hundreds of times and can tell you: this part is normal, this is what comes next, and this specific thing you’re worried about is not a sign that something is wrong.
That’s a different thing from encouragement. It’s pattern recognition, the kind that only comes from having seen enough searches to know what a stuck search looks like versus a search that just needs more time.
When You Can DIY a Career Change and When You Shouldn’t
What working with someone who knows the patterns actually provides
Because I work with a significant number of clients at any given time, I can see things that are very hard to see from inside a single search. I know what a normal response rate looks like for a pivoter in the current market. I know which fields are moving and which are slow. I know when a run of rejections means something needs to change and when it just means the search needs more time.
That perspective is genuinely hard to replicate alone. You have one data point: your search. I have hundreds. The difference between “something is wrong with my approach” and “this is just what this part of a pivot search feels like” is not obvious from the inside, but it’s usually clear for me.
For capable people who are used to diagnosing and solving their own problems, that outside perspective is often the one thing they couldn’t get anywhere else. Not because they lack the intelligence to figure it out. They don’t. But because they’re too close to it, and because they’re going through something genuinely unfamiliar in a market that’s harder than the last one they navigated.
You don’t have to do it alone. And for most people, doing it alone costs more than they expected in time, in confidence, and in the quality of where they land.
If you’re not ready to talk yet but you want to keep thinking about this, the newsletter is a good place to continue. I write about what career change actually looks like from the inside, for people who are capable and stuck and trying to figure out what comes next.
You can sign up below.
P.S. If you’re ready to stop doing this alone, Where You Are is where we start.
FAQ
Can I change careers without a career coach?
Yes in certain situations. DIY works best when you’re willing to start at the bottom of the new field, when the financial stakes of the search are lower, or when you can genuinely evaluate your own situation with the same objectivity an outside expert would bring. If none of those conditions apply, the DIY path tends to produce a lot of effort with limited traction.
How do I know if I need help with my career change?
The clearest signal is a search that’s been running for a while without producing interviews, especially if you’ve been putting in real effort. The absence of traction is market feedback. It’s telling you something isn’t translating, even if it’s not telling you what. If you’ve been in that position for more than a few months and haven’t been able to diagnose and fix it yourself, that’s when outside support tends to pay off.
Is career coaching worth the money?
For the right person at the right stage, yes, usually significantly so. The calculation isn’t the coaching fee versus nothing. It’s the coaching fee versus the cost of a search that runs six months longer than it needs to, takes the wrong role out of exhaustion, or never gets off the ground because the translation work wasn’t done. When it works, it shortens the path and improves the outcome. The honest answer is that it doesn’t work equally well for everyone, which is why the DIY criteria above are worth reading carefully.