Are You Ready For a Career Change? | BTalk Australia

(8min 12) Ready for a change? Are you at the stage where you think you can get more out of your life? Is your job dragging you down? Well, the good news is it’s never too late to change. That’s a message from a book by Alison Haynes called “Change: How to Kick Start the Future and Refresh the Spirit” (published by Murdoch Books).

Today on BTalk Australia Phil Dobbie talks to Alison about what drives change and how you can embrace it.

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• Today’s Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie. Today on BTalk, change; are you ready for it? It’s the only constant in life and Alison Haynes has written a book about it called, “Change: How to Kick Start the Future and Refresh the Spirit”. And she joins me now. Alison, a lot of change is foisted on us and do you think we have to put up with more of it these days?

Alison Haynes: Yeah definitely. The pace of change has changed dramatically over the last probably hundred years, particularly driven by technology and one area where that really shows is work and business.

Dobbie: I look at my dad for example, he stayed in the same job, married to the same woman, lived in the same part of the country, I think he changed his shirt everyday but that was about it.

Haynes: Yeah and even the length of time that people are expected to stay in a job has really changed again. That word change.

Dobbie: Yeah.

Haynes: It’s not uncommon for young people to say just leaving the university now to be advised to spend just a couple of years in different jobs and switch around so that they get broad experience and hardly anybody would expect to spend a whole lifetime in just one organisation now. So with that change comes a lot of uncertainty I think and that’s something which is characteristic of modern life.

Dobbie: Yeah and how do you think, generally as a race, we’re adapting to that? Or aren’t we? It’s getting harder I guess.

Haynes: Yeah, I guess there are a lot of stress-related diseases in life style diseases, which show that we’re not always coping with it very well. So it’s very important if you’re considering change to think about the whole picture and think about your health and make sure you’re not just sitting at the desk all the time and just a lot of common sense I guess.

Dobbie: Now sometimes it’s good to have a change. I mean, it’s better to if you’re midway through your career for example, you decide you don’t enjoy working, you need to change your career, but is that really possible these days? I mean you do tend to get typecast don’t you, into the same sort of role?

Haynes: Look you can do but I think life’s short and why not give it a go? If you prepare your way and have reasonable expectations, there’s no reason why you can’t make a second career. Sometimes you might need to do some retraining, you certainly will have to research your options and maybe you’re going to have a bit of a decline in income for a while, but quite often people do that, do make that change. They go and build a vineyard or something or grow a vineyard and they find that even though it’s harder and they’re earning less it’s something they really love doing and they’re really glad they did it. And they’re really glad to get up in the morning which, I think sometimes when you get stuck in a rut, people you know, they’re getting depressed, they get down and they’re wondering why they’re getting up in the morning.

Dobbie: Yeah, I wonder whether also how much of this desire for change is that realisation, I guess it’s the old mid-life thing isn’t it? That you look at your age, then you look at retirement age and you go, gee they’re closer than they used to be, still got a long way to go, so I should make sure I enjoy that you know, remaining ten or twenty years.

Haynes: Yeah, that’s right and I’ve personally just gone back to university and intend to change my career and I think I could well have a twenty-year career in a different industry. And I think that’s really valid.

Dobbie: Yeah. Now when we’re younger, a lot of us look for money don’t we? Do you think the motivation changes as we get older? You know, what we’re looking for in work?

Haynes: I suppose one thing that does change quite a bit is that you may well have a house and have had the car and you’re not as desperate to get even though it’s that early but I think that you do need.

Dobbie: All the materialistic stuff.

Haynes: Yeah, the material things. So yeah, you don’t need it as much as you did earlier on and yes I think you’re right that people do, they change the way that they look at things and money doesn’t rear it’s head quite as much as before.

Dobbie: Now you’ve got a chapter in your book on soul searching. Do we look more for meaning as we get older and does that influence the kind of work we do or how we work perhaps? What did you find when you were researching that chapter in your book?

Haynes: I think there’s different phases of people’s lives and in that middle stage you’re often very concerned with bringing up a family and that will mean money, because you’ve got to feed them, you’ve got to pay the bills and then as things get a bit easier and perhaps your children leave home and they have their own income, then people sometimes think about voluntary work and yeah, work with more meaning and not necessarily even earning anything if they can manage. I think people do start reflecting more. I looked at ways that people could search for more meaning if they wanted to and just looked at religions and different sort of non-profit organizations and I was really impressed actually just how much is going on and how many activist groups and that sort of stuff are happening. It’s not all about the clean sort of marketing images that we get in magazines and TV.

Dobbie: Is that because people are starting to associate themselves more with different things from work? I guess early on in life, you do tend to associate who you are a lot with what you do.

Haynes: I think it’s important to remember that work is really, I think work’s really important. Gives you a sense of identity, it gives you meaning, interest, challenge, all those things. When children come along, I mean not that everybody has children, but when children come along work does get pushed to the side a bit but you realise that it’s not everything and it’s not a big a part of your identity as you thought it was before. Yeah, so that’s definitely a progression.

Dobbie: Definitely understand that completely.

Haynes: Yeah.

Dobbie: Now it’s a bold move choosing to change jobs or to change career midway through and some people do it you know, two or three times in their work life. So what sort of questions do you think you should ask yourself before you make that leap? You know, how do you make sure if you’re making the move it’s in the right direction?

Haynes: Yeah, I think you need to do a lot of homework. You need to do a lot of reflection. People have different styles, some people are very impulsive and they’ll go off and they’ll do it anyway and sometimes those people are going to do the best. But I think most of us need to think hard about what it is we’re looking for, perhaps you could even start by thinking well what is it that I don’t like about where I am now and what am I hoping for if I do change, make a change for work. You need to look at your skills, you need to look at whether you need to do some retraining or do some other learning. Taking stock of your financial situation and lots of research about the actual industry or you may not even have a particular thing in mind to begin with, but lots and lots of research, reading, talking to people if you can, maybe trying some voluntary work you know, in a field, just to get a taste for it to see if that really is going to suit you. So I think yes, lots of reflection, perhaps get a great big bit of paper and then do a bit of brainstorming, and give yourself some time to think through where you think you might be going and why and how you could do it.

Dobbie: So I guess a large part of it as well isn’t it, is about taking control? If you can drive that change yourself, rather than having that change foisted on you, which as you said you know, is perhaps the cause of a lot of disease and angst amongst us.

Haynes: Yes, when you’re in control, you feel a lot happier and it’s much more exciting and, I guess, the theme running through my book was the idea that when people stall, they can get depressed and this was how about how to bring about change when you need it. So taking control is a definite good thing when it comes to feeling better.

Dobbie: OK, well thanks so much for your time today Alison. It’s called “Change How to Kick Start the Future and Refresh the Spirit” and the book’s been changed as well. It’s got a new cover now.

Haynes: Yeah, we’ve got a second edition. So a nice jolly cover with some songs on the line. I’m not quite sure what that’s supposed to mean.

Dobbie: OK, always good. A second edition’s always a good thing.

Haynes: Yeah, that’s right.

Dobbie: Thanks for your time Alison.

Haynes: OK thanks Phil.