How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition)

Rating:
Summary: If you are stuck in mid-career then read this.
Review: Excellent article about an alternative path to changing careers. For anybody who's bought "career" books, or paid for a career counselor, the $'s for this article will be well spent.

Rating:
Summary: If you are stuck in mid-career then read this.
Review: Excellent article about an alternative path to changing careers. For anybody who's bought "career" books, or paid for a career counselor, the $'s for this article will be well spent.

Rating:
Summary: An alternative approach to changing careers
Review: Herminia Ibarra is Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, the French business school. This article was published in the December 2002-issue of Harvard Business Review.

In this article Ibarra discusses the significant rise over the last decade in the number of people making major career changes. But despite various heroic efforts, most people who would like to change career paths remain stuck in the wrong careers. Why? According to the author most people fail because they go about it all wrong. The problem does not lie with motives, but with the methods used. The author's research found that the traditional knowing-planning-action sequence leads to disastrous results - or, in this case, no result. Instead people should follow a first-act-and-then-think sequence. This approach is based on "working identity, which, the author found, is a matter of skill, not personality, and therefore can be learned by almost anyone seeking professional renewal." She then continues to discuss the three common practices that lie at the heart of the test-and-learn approach: Crafting experiments, shifting connections, and making sense. The article describes numerous successful and unsuccessful stories as examples.

Yes, I do like this article. It is attractive and fashionable since more and more people would like a change in career/life. The author provides us with good advice based on both academic and real-life research. The approach she promotes sounds very ambitious/extreme and really goes against human nature, or, perhaps I should say, against our educational background (think before you act). The article is written in simple US-English.

Rating:
Summary: ok article
Review: Yes we've all been there: we are stuck in our career and going nowhwere. While ths article offers some useful tips on identifying when you are really stuck and what you should do, the bottom line is that you've got to make sacrifices. Usually it is a high paying job (if it was low paying you would ditch it for another low paying job -- it's the high paying jobs that are hard to come by) and the artsy fartsy job that doesn't pay anything that we have to decide between. On top of that, some of us have families to support, mortgages to pay, etc. So what to do? Well identify what you want to do and break it into smaller steps. That part is simple. The difficult part is executing. Most of us come home tired from work and we don't feel like doing anything else. But if you want to break out of the rat race, you have to take steps to improve yourself.
And that often means working a little harder...

Rating:
Summary: ok article
Review: Yes we've all been there: we are stuck in our career and going nowhwere. While ths article offers some useful tips on identifying when you are really stuck and what you should do, the bottom line is that you've got to make sacrifices. Usually it is a high paying job (if it was low paying you would ditch it for another low paying job -- it's the high paying jobs that are hard to come by) and the artsy fartsy job that doesn't pay anything that we have to decide between. On top of that, some of us have families to support, mortgages to pay, etc. So what to do? Well identify what you want to do and break it into smaller steps. That part is simple. The difficult part is executing. Most of us come home tired from work and we don't feel like doing anything else. But if you want to break out of the rat race, you have to take steps to improve yourself.
And that often means working a little harder...