Career Transition

If you have read this far — through the articles about retrenchment recovery and reskilling and interview preparation and salary negotiation and burnout and confidence and identity — you have been doing something more than reading about career change.

Getting the new job is the outcome that the career transition process is building toward. But it is not the end of the journey — it is the beginning of a new one. And the first six months in a new role after a significant career transition carry their own specific challenges and opportunities.

Of all the tools available to a mid-career professional planning a career transition, the informational interview may be the most underused and most powerful.

The professional horizon at 50 in Singapore is significantly longer than most people in their 50s acknowledge. Singapore’s re-employment legislation extends obligations to 68. Retirement is not economically realistic for most professionals at 55. And increasingly, many Singapore professionals choose to work into their 60s not because they must but because purposeful professional engagement contributes to wellbeing.

The decision to leave a job is one of the most consequential and least systematically approached decisions in professional life. Most people either leave too impulsively — when frustration peaks — or too late — when they have already paid a significant wellbeing cost for staying.