Changing careers can be exciting - but it’s not always the answer to working life’s problems.
I met an undergraduate recently who was working alongside her studies. Not in a traditional student job, pulling pints or stacking shelves, but advising a marketing agency on youth trends. “Is that what you want to do when you graduate,” I asked naively. “God no,” came the reply. “That’s not my passion.”
I nodded sympathetically. This was no place for a lecture on the difficulties of pursuing passion at work, which can put undue pressure on jobs to be not just a means to a pay cheque but a calling. Or worse, lead to exploitation by employers — or, as Sarah Jaffe put it in her book Work Won’t Love You Back, “the labour of love...is a con”. The student’s fresh-faced enthusiasm, however, thawed my frozen heart — if you can’t be optimistic with your whole future ahead of you, when can you?
But another reason to hold back was that I had recently read about UBS’s chief risk officer, who is to leave the Swiss bank to become a photographer, in the process swapping a highly paid job presumably for a more creative — dare I say it, passion-fuelled — one.
In the past few years, these dramatic stories have become commonplace. The Great Resignation was a term that emerged from the pandemic to describe workers whose skills were in high demand, switching jobs for higher salaries and sign-on bonuses. But it also included those who re-evaluated their lives and changed careers, leading some to see it as a “pandemic midlife crisis”. As one opinion piece put it: “By disrupting our lives and placing us in a deeply unfamiliar world, while also confronting our own mortality, Covid-19 created a universal turning point...a standard characteristic of the identity crisis typically associated with middle age.”