How You Know You're Ready For A Career Change: 6 Signs

At some point in time, you might feel like you’re ready to take your career in a different direction. There could be many reasons for this, but at the end of the day, you want to make a change.

For many, the thought of switching careers feels scary and intimidating. Walking into the unknown requires you to take a risk and visualize a different outcome, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it in the end.

It’s also important that your career choice leaves you feeling satisfied and happy at the end of the day. No job is perfect or comes without its challenges, but doing something you find meaningful is crucial.

In this post, we’re going to share 6 signs that might mean you’re ready for a career change. Let’s get started.

1. You’ve Lost Interest

Do you no longer feel a passion for your profession and the work that you do? If so, this could be a telltale sign that you’re over your job and perhaps even the entire industry you work for.

You know yourself better than anyone and only you know when you’re over a current situation. It’s definitely time to switch gears and look into other options if you’ve lost interest in your career and have no intention of moving forward with it.

2. You Don’t Care to Put in Effort

Perhaps when you first started on your career path, you put in all the time and effort in the world. Your excitement alone was enough to motivate you to work harder and persevere through the challenges and hardships.

However, as interest in your career dwindles, so does the effort you put into it. It becomes more difficult to stay focused, finish tasks, and meet deadlines. This can quickly become an issue and prevent you from achieving your goals and getting where you want to be

3. You’re Not Learning or Growing

When was the last time you felt that you learned something new in your position? If you don’t see yourself growing in your field or taking away anything valuable, it’ll quickly become boring and stagnant.

Part of what makes a career worthwhile is knowing you can excel and move higher up the harder you work. If there’s a cap to how much you can accomplish or learn, you’re likelier to feel stuck in a repetitive cycle.

It’s important for a career to boost your creativity and give you a sense of meaning you’re content with where you’re at. It’s harder to do when your job feels the same every single day.

4. Time off Doesn’t Help

Time off is necessary to recoup and refresh your mind to continue performing well at work and in other areas of your life. For some, simply taking time away from their work is enough to pull them back in afterward. Once they’ve had enough space away from work life, they’re ready to dive back in and start fresh.

However, if you take time away from your career and still dread going back, that’s a sign you aren’t happy and desperately need a change.

You shouldn’t hate what you do or anxiously anticipate completing your tasks. While work isn’t always going to be easy, it shouldn’t cause you daily distress and anxiety. You deserve to do something you love and make a change.

5. You’re Mentally and Physically Exhausted

No matter how much sleep you get or exercise you perform, you’ll continue to feel tired if you spend day after day unhappy and dissatisfied. If you’re exhausted mentally, that can translate into physical symptoms, a major one being exhaustion.

If the thought of continuing your career path drains you, you’re better off looking at other options with a better chance of making you happy. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life wishing you took a leap of faith and invested in your personal growth when you had the chance.

6. You Want Your Life to Look Different

When you envision your dream life, what do you see? If it looks vastly different from the life you live right now, a huge part of that could be due to your career.

Because building a career takes so much time and effort, it’s important that your day to day life is still fulfilling and meaningful to you. Think about how you want to spend your work life and what that looks like.

Do you want to work a set schedule or have more flexibility throughout the week? How many days a week do you want to work? Would you like to travel for your career? What would a typical work week or day look like if you could have it your way?

Once you have a clearer picture of your goals and expectations, it’s easier to map out a plan to change your career path and find fulfillment in your work.

Over to You

These signs are a game-changer in helping you figure out if it’s time for a career switch. Whether you’ve lost passion for what you do or feel exhausted all the time, you deserve to do work that means something to you.