Starting off our careers, most of us heard the same advice: Find what speaks to you, stay the course, collect the promotions. That formula made sense when a working life ran three decades and the ensuing pension was sufficient for the rest of our lives. It does not hold when careers are estimated to stretch across 60 years.
Over six decades, industries reorganize, skills expire, and the person doing the work becomes someone else entirely. Gamze Dinckok Yucaoglu, co-founder of the What’s Next Initiative and co-author of The Many Lives of Work, has spent the past three years researching career transitions and has rebuilt her own working life twice, across energy, research, and education policy. Her conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone who treats career planning as a one-time decision: the durable career is not the one you choose well once, it is the one you keep maintaining and iterating. But most people only start the maintenance after something has already broken.
Audit Yourself Before Anything Breaks
The standard trigger for career reflection is a crisis. A restructuring, a bad manager, a burnout episode, a missed promotion. By the time any of those arrive, the person reassessing their work is doing it under duress, with a shortened runway and a shrinking set of options. That is the worst possible condition for a consequential decision, and it is the condition under which most career changes get made.
Yucaoglu’s alternative is to run the assessment while nothing is wrong. “Most people wait for a crisis to ask whether their work still fits. Try asking it while things are still fine,” she says. Her method is deliberately small and suspiciously low-effort. “For three days, track your energy rather than your tasks. What lifted you? What drained you? Patterns will surface, and they tend to be more honest than any five-year plan.” Three days is short enough that anyone can do it and long enough to expose a pattern. It also sidesteps the central weakness of the five-year plan, namely that it asks a person to forecast the preferences of a future self they have not met yet. The experiment produces data observed rather than predicted, which is why Yucaoglu trusts it more.
Build Skills Proactively
Years of deepening expertise in a single lane produce genuine mastery and, at the same time, a dangerous kind of narrowness. When conditions change, the specialist has depth but no adjacent ground to step onto. Every available option requires starting from zero, which is precisely the cost most mid-career professionals cannot absorb.
“Careers evolve when you have material to work with,” Yucaoglu says. The material she means is the learning you pursue before knowing how you will use it. “A course, a new tool, a subject you’re curious about with no obvious use yet. These become the bridges later on.” That framing runs directly against how most organizations, and most people, evaluate professional development. Training budgets get justified against current role requirements. Employees pick courses that demonstrate obvious relevance to the job they already have. The logic is tidy and it produces exactly the narrowness that makes people brittle later. Yucaoglu’s answer is to accept the inefficiency on purpose. “You rarely know which one you’ll need, which is exactly why you build a few.” Some of the learning will never be used. That is not waste, it is the price of optionality, and it is only affordable while someone is employed, paid, and not yet desperate. The professional who waits until a change is necessary to start learning has already lost the window.
Invest In The Edges Of Your Network
Professional networks tend to concentrate. People accumulate contacts in their own function, their own industry, their own seniority band, and mistake that density for strength. It is strength of a kind, useful for getting things done inside the current job, but it has a structural flaw as a career asset: everyone in it holds the same picture of who you are. That picture is accurate about the past and much less useful about the future.
Yucaoglu puts it plainly. “Your closest network knows the version of you that already exists.” The openings, she argues, come from somewhere else. “The doors to what comes next usually open through looser connections: people in adjacent industries or former colleagues who took a different turn.” Those relationships are the ones that decay first, because nothing in a normal working week requires maintaining them. However, they also carry information the inner circle does not have, which is what makes them valuable. Her instruction on timing is the sharpest point she makes on the subject: “Reach out before you need something.” A loose contact approached during a job search hears a request. The same contact approached a year earlier has a conversation, and that conversation is what makes the later request answerable. The people who appear to get ahead in transitions are normally the ones who made this effort years in advance. “A career that evolves with you is not luck,” Yucaoglu says. “It is the result of small, deliberate moves made while you still have room to make them. Start one this month.”
Follow Gamze Dinckok Yucaoglu on LinkedIn for more insights on career transitions, professional reinvention, and building a working life that lasts.
