“I really need to be good at what I’m doing before I decide my next move. And I don’t feel like I’m there yet.”

I heard this recently from a young woman a year into her first job. What she expressed seemed worth elaborating on for anyone facing the same question early in a career.

I think her implicit career model looks something like this: first, learn the job. Then, get good enough at it to know what the job is really like. Then decide whether to keep doing it. There’s nothing irrational about that sequence. The problem is that a job decision is often required before the process finishes.

After a year, someone genuinely hasn’t performed a corporate role with complete proficiency yet. But it can take time to get there. I still remember exactly where I was standing the first time I realized I knew what I was doing professionally. I was about three years into my legal career. The reason I still remember this after all these years is I noticed how relieved I felt that I no longer had to put so much energy into figuring things out. I could recognize patterns, anticipate what came next, and make informed calls instead of guesses.

In someone’s first year or two, the learning load is multiplied. It isn’t just learning a role; it’s learning an occupation and learning how to be a professional at the same time: how organizations function, how much direction to expect, how to manage competing priorities, what good judgment looks like, when to ask for help, how to read feedback, and dozens of situations college couldn’t have prepared anyone for.That leaves someone who needs or wants to move early with a genuine dilemma: they’re trying to make a decision about a career they haven’t had time to fully experience.

I think there is another way to frame the issue that helps open possibilities. Herminia Ibarra’s research on career transitions is useful here. Studying professionals moving into new roles, she found that professional identity develops partly through experimentation: people observe possible role models, try out what she calls “provisional selves,” and learn from how those experiments land (Ibarra, 1999). Her broader work rejects the tidy sequence of reflect-decide-act and argues instead for a test-and-learn model, developed further in her book Working Identity (2003). She argues you should act before you’re certain, and the acting generates the certainty.

The common assumption is that because someone can’t yet answer: “Do I want to do this for my career?” they don’t know what to do next. But those are two different questions. Someone may not know what a job feels like once they’ve mastered it, but they already have real information about what it feels like now.  They know whether the problems interest them, they’re curious to learn more, they like how they spend their working day. They can watch people a few years ahead of them and gauge if that work appeals to them. They know if they’re succeeding. That’s short of enough evidence for a verdict on whether this might be the best long time career, but it’s plenty of information for the next decision.

So, the advice for young professionals struggling with this isn’t to answer whether this is the field for a whole career. It is to answer a smaller question instead.  Have I learned enough to know whether this is worth one more shot at doing this type of job and gaining the experience to figure out if it’s a good long-term fit?

If the answer is yes, take the next opportunity in the field and keep going; that’s how the rest of the evidence gets gathered. If the answer is no, claim that mismatch directly.

Your next job is not your forever job, and the numbers back that up: young workers hold an average of five jobs in just the five years between ages 18 and 23 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022). Changing jobs early in your career is the norm. Another job in the same general field doesn’t have to be a lifelong commitment.  It allows someone to keep building their skills while gaining information the current job can’t give them. Namely, whether their abilities transfer to another organization. Then the bigger question can be asked again: stay in this field, or try something else?

There’s a lot of pressure on young people to have career answers. It starts when you are very small and adults ask what you want to be when you grow up. It continues after college with questions like “what’s your five-year plan” and “is this the right career for you. It’s fine not to have the answer yet. The goal isn’t to manufacture certainty. It’s choosing the next experience that provides better information.

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Resources

Ibarra, H. (1999). Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), 764–791. https://doi.org/10.2307/2667055

Ibarra, H. (2003). Working identity: Unconventional strategies for reinventing your career. Harvard Business School Press.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2022, April 15). People born in early 1980s held an average of 8.6 jobs from ages 18 through 34. TED: The Economics Daily. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/people-born-in-early-1980s-held-an-average-of-8-6-jobs-from-ages-18-through-34.htm