Leaving well: the six months before a career change

Career changes fail in a small number of predictable ways, and hardly any of them are about the new field being wrong. They fail because someone left with three months of savings and no contacts, or because they spent two years preparing and never left, or because they treated one bad quarter as a calling.

What follows is not a plan. It is the shape that the successful ones tend to share, drawn from a couple of decades of watching people do it well and badly.

Months one and two: establish that it is real

The first job is to find out whether you want the new thing or merely want out of the current thing. These feel identical for about six weeks and they lead to completely different decisions. Wanting out is a legitimate reason to move, but it points at a different job in the same field far more often than it points at a new field.

The test is cheap. Spend the first two months doing the smallest real version of the new work, unpaid if necessary, in evenings. Not a course, not reading. The actual work. A surprising number of people discover in week five that they liked the idea of the new field and do not much like the day of it, and they have found that out for the price of a few evenings rather than a year of income.

Months two to four: talk to twelve people

Twelve conversations with people already doing the work, at different levels of seniority. Not networking, and not asking for a job. Asking what the bad days look like, what they earn, what they wish they had known, and what the first two years cost them.

Twelve is roughly the number at which the picture stops changing. Below six you are still hearing individual stories. By twelve the pattern is visible, including the parts nobody puts on a professional profile. This single step does more to prevent an expensive mistake than everything else on this page.

Months three to five: fix the number

Work out precisely what the transition costs. How long the reduced income lasts, what the floor is, how many months of runway you have, and what you would cut. Write it down. A career change with a number attached is a project. Without one it is a hope, and hopes get abandoned at the first difficult month because there was never a plan for the difficult month.

This is also where the honest conversation with anyone who depends on you belongs. Not after the resignation.

Month six: leave properly

Serve the notice, finish the handover, and leave a good impression with people who will be in your industry adjacent world for the next twenty years. The bridge you burn on the way out is one you will want in about four years, roughly when the new thing hits its first hard patch.

Leaving well is not sentimentality. It is the cheapest insurance available to somebody about to be new at something again.

Why this suits a six month engagement

The shape above is not complicated, and almost nobody does it alone, because each stage contains one uncomfortable task that is easy to defer indefinitely. The twelve conversations get postponed. The number does not get written down. The evening version of the work never quite starts.

A fortnightly session makes each of those a commitment with a date on it and a person who will ask. That is the entire mechanism, and it is why the six month version of one to one coaching maps onto this so directly. Twelve sessions, roughly two per stage, with the day seven note catching the fortnights where nothing happened.

One warning. If the current job is genuinely making you unwell, this timetable is the wrong advice and leaving sooner is the right one. That is a decision for you and a clinician, not for a coach and a six month plan.