Navigating Career Uncertainty: Concrete Steps to Forge Your Path Forward

Career uncertainty is the feeling of being unsure about your professional path and your future. 

When you’re uncertain about what direction to take in your career and feel stuck or lost, you are experiencing career uncertainty. This may lead to feelings of anxiousness, stress, or even burnout.

All of that is bad…

(TL;DR – just want The Concrete Steps to Get Unstuck? <- Click that)

For our purposes, we will focus on work related career uncertainty for the rest of this article.

Understanding Career Uncertainty

In order to deal with it, you need to recognize it. To recognize it, you need to understand it’s symptoms.

Exploring Career Anxiety and Burnout

Career anxiety and burnout are common consequences of uncertainty in your professional life. This uncertainty can be caused by work related reasons (i.e. conflict with a boss) or unrelated externalities (i.e. economic downturn). 

Regardless of the source, this anxiety can manifest as persistent worry about your career direction and a fear of making the wrong choices. Burnout, on the other hand, occurs when prolonged stress and dissatisfaction lead to emotional exhaustion and decreased motivation at work.

Identifying Career Indecision (Being Stuck)

Career uncertainty can lead to career indecision – a feeling of being stuck. Indecision can also manifest as procrastination, lack of clarity, fear of commitment, and conflicting goals. 

It is important to recognize that being stuck is the effect not the cause. You don’t solve being stuck. You solve the career anxiety or burnout that’s causing it.

Why?

Because “being stuck” is a belief or an opinion, not a fact. It never is. That belief is constructed by your brain, and it relies on your emotional state to exist. Basically, your state of anxiety or burnout colors your perspective, perpetuating the belief that you are stuck.

Change your emotional state, and the belief that you are stuck will disappear.

Examining the Root Causes: Pressure, Stress, and Crisis

Career uncertainty can emerge from external pressures, internal stressors, or unexpected crises. 

• Pressure from your employer, and the tendency of corporations to pigeonhole individuals, commodifying their talents, or making them replaceable.
• Pressure from society, family, or peers to pursue certain paths can contribute to feelings of uncertainty. 
• Internal stressors like self-doubt or fear of failure can also hinder decision-making.
• Unexpected life events, economic turmoil, political upheaval, or changes in the job market. 

Understanding these root causes is crucial in addressing and overcoming career uncertainty.

Dealing with Career Uncertainty

Now that you know what it feels like to experience career uncertainty, as well as related challenges and their symptoms, let’s focus on resolving it.

There are great ways, good ways, and horrible ways to deal with career uncertainty. Let’s unpack them..

The Problem with Coping Techniques

If you do a brief search online you are likely to come up with many methods for dealing with career uncertainty. Unfortunately most of these methods are useless at best, and harmful at worst.

While the coping techniques listed below are commonly suggested to manage career uncertainty, it’s essential to acknowledge their limitations or potential harm:

• Learning the Art of Surrender: Surrendering to uncertainty without taking proactive steps to address it can lead to complacency and lack of progress. Merely accepting your situation without actively seeking solutions may actually prolong feelings of uncertainty and contribute to their increase.
• Identifying the Positives: While it’s beneficial to find silver linings in challenging situations, focusing solely on the positives may ignore the underlying issues causing career uncertainty. Positive thinking alone won’t provide concrete solutions.
• Focusing on What You’re Grateful For: Gratitude can be a powerful cope, but it’s not a substitute for taking practical steps towards career clarity.
• Being of Service to Others: Helping others can be fulfilling and provide a sense of purpose. But it can also turn into a distraction from addressing your own career challenges. Prioritizing other people’s needs over your own can make you ignore self-care and personal development.
• Keeping an Open Mind: Keeping an open mind to what? While being open-minded is valuable (Big 5 Trait openness is related to creativity, and creativity can be very lucrative), keeping an open mind will not solve your career uncertainty. Moreover, blindly considering all possibilities without critical evaluation may lead to more harm than good.
• Focusing on What You Can Control: While focusing on aspects within your control can feel empowering, it is in reality the opposite – disempowering. The whole point of career development is increasing the field of your control and power. While it’s essential to recognize that not all factors influencing your career are under your control, ignoring to expand your power to gain control of external factors is a bad strategy.
• Exercising Self-Care: Self-care is crucial for maintaining well-being. It’s not a standalone solution for addressing career uncertainty. 

Embracing Practical Solutions to Career Uncertainty

To effectively address career uncertainty, follow the three steps below:

Step 1: Acknowledging the Reality 

Acknowledge that career uncertainty is a natural and common experience. Acknowledge that you are experiencing it. But don’t resign yourself to it. Don’t give up. 

Recognize the need for action and change, rather than passive acceptance.

Step 2: Surrendering to the Process

Let go of the need for immediate answers or perfect solutions. You are going to need to engage in a process. Some of it is going to be uncomfortable. Some of it is going to be fun.

Don’t surrender to career uncertainty. Surrender to the process of overcoming it. During this process, remember that the feeling of uncertainty can actually be healthy for your brain, as it helps you learn better.

Step 3: Taking Action

Instead of relying on coping mechanisms, take proactive steps towards clarifying your career goals and exploring potential paths forward. 

The rest of this article is going to show you how to take these actions

From Career Uncertainty to Career Clarity

Here’s how you go from career uncertainty to career clarity:

Clear Your Head

You need to become comfortable with reality.

This means, you need to cultivate a clear, sober, and realistic view of what’s going on in your career.

Perhaps you are unsure about your job prospects. Maybe you don’t like the career track you are on. Maybe you feel like you’ve wasted years doing the wrong jobs and now you feel stuck…

However you feel, you need to learn to objectively observe whatever your situation is, rather than being clouded by your emotions about it.

This type of clarity is rather hard to achieve when you are inundated with negative emotions, and the pessimistic outlook. Therefore, in order to develop clear vision, you will need to employ a number of reframes.

Reframe 1 – Find Opportunities Amidst Challenges

Train yourself to see challenges as opportunities for growth and learning. Every setback is a chance to reassess and pivot towards a more fulfilling career path. Every difficulty is a stoic call to become a better version of yourself. 

Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest.

Marcus Aurelius

Reframe 2 – Cultivate Optimism and Curiosity 

Maintain a positive outlook. Stay curious about potential opportunities. Optimism not only breeds resilience, but it gives you a propensity for taking calculated risks, which are crucial for career development. 

Reframe 3 – Embrace Uncertainty as an Adventure, Not a Roadblock

Shift your mindset to view uncertainty as an exciting journey rather than a barrier. The unknown isn’t just filled with horrors. It also contains treasures. 

Perhaps you think that the future of your job is uncertain. Maybe your profession is going to disappear. Maybe the company you work for is going to become bankrupt. By no means are we suggesting not these are anything but undesirable events. Yet, they are also calls to adventure…

The uncertain job might force you to develop a high value skill. The disappearing profession might force you to move higher up in management. The bankrupt company might motivate you to look for much better jobs that you didn’t even know existed.

If you embrace adventure, you will adapt and thrive.

Empowerment through Research and Education

Start by arming yourself with knowledge. Research industry trends, explore different career paths, and continuously educate yourself to stay informed.

Moreover, cultivate career skills – the skills that help you get jobs and get promoted. These are becoming much more important than they were in the past, especially due to the rapidly changing job market.

Strategic Planning a Clear Path Forward

Outline your career goals and the steps needed to achieve them. This means, you will set measurable milestones and timelines to track your progress and adjust your strategy as needed.

A great way to do this is to write a single paragraph about your dream job. Imagine yourself 6 months in the future, and write a paragraph describing your ideal job. Then do the same for 3 years in the future.

Once this is done, under each paragraph, put three bullet points describing “what would need to be true” (WWNTBT), for you to have this job.

Creating & Controlling Value

The power of your career is determined by your ability to create and/or control value.

This means, you will need to learn how to generate opportunities, period. No one’s going to come save you, you will need to save yourself.

Instead of waiting for opportunities to come to you, you need to proactively create them. This includes identifying ways to add value in your current role or explore relationships (see benefactors) that allow you to take control of your career trajectory.

Take Concrete Steps to Get Unstuck

Once you’ve cleared your head, acknowledged your situation, decided to step up, and articulated your goals, use the following steps to take immediate action in order to get unstuck.

1. Define YOUR Success Criteria: Our fastest recommendation for defining success criteria is to list up to 5 possible titles that you would want. These titles need to be, not just positions you can see yourself doing, but positions you would feel proud to have. Define what success looks for you. Don’t try to be realistic. Try to be excited. Success, at a minimum, must also mean, you are excited to show up to work every day.
2. Thoroughly Research: Understand “what would need to be true” (WWNTBT) for you to have these titles. Do you need credentials? Contacts? Hard skills? Reputation? Soft-skills or career skills? A bigger and better network? Endorsements? Benefactors? Mentors? Coaches? A foot in the door? An uncle on the board? A patent in your name? A LinkedIn following? Whatever you need, others have gotten it, and there’s a way to get it. 
3. Expand Your Options:  During this research, keep your eyes open to unexpected possibilities. Perhaps you need a stepping stone job. Or maybe you need to complete a particular project in order to be qualified for the type of job you actually want. The more you research, the more clear your path will become. (Hint: the best research is to talk to insiders)
4. Conduct a Thorough Self-Assessment: Go through your resume and update it. Then review your marketable skills and compare them with the five core skills and the seven high-value disciplines. You need to know how much of your uncertainty is due to a lack of hard-skills vs. soft-skills. We can solve the soft-skills part quite rapidly (one or two weekends can be enough). For the hard-skills, we can point in the right direction, but you will likely need to plan for months if not years ahead.
5. Seek Professional Career Counseling: Doing all this on your own is not only challenging, but even counterproductive. You don’t want to be an expert in everything, including being an expert in career counseling or professional development. The wise professional will lean on their strengths, while leveraging others to cover for their weaknesses. You should focus on getting good at one thing that is really marketable, and let the rest of the professional world support you in your quest toward career fulfillment. We are here to help.
6. Acquire New Skills and Diverse Experiences: Sometimes you need to lean on the random…  Do something uncharacteristic, like taking an improv class, or signing up for a retreat, or taking a consulting gig, or volunteering your time. Expanding your horizons can have compounding effects on your career development.

Conclusion

If you are experiencing career uncertainty (why else would you read this)… Now is the time for you to take action!

Start shaping your career path towards clarity and fulfillment. Instead of relying on abstract coping mechanisms, prioritize concrete steps that lead to tangible results.

Remember, the journey to career clarity may not always be smooth, but each step forward brings you closer to a more fulfilling professional life. 

Take that first step today. The time to act is now, not later.

Right now.