A change is gonna come
Over the last three weeks, we've looked at career change patterns among executives. We saw that most CEOs and C-suite leaders of the AI 50 have changed careers several times, while Fortune 100 execs have changed much less often. We also saw that, among execs, career changers are more likely to hire other career changers, and that execs hired in the last 12 months are more likely to be career changers than in previous years.
This got me curious about two things:
- We've looked extensively at executives, but what about everyone else?
- Do career changers show up differently in public?
This brings us to the last installment of our series on career changers.
250 career changers walk into a bar
Last week, I ran a poll on my LinkedIn asking people to share how many different career eras they've had. A career era is a period of time when you're doing basically the same kind of work for basically the same type of organization. For instance:
- If you've been an academic, a software engineer, and a stay-at-home parent, that is three eras
- If you've been an account executive at three different SaaS startups, that is one era
- If you've been a product marketer at Microsoft and Google and a startup founder, that is two eras
You get the idea. For this article, I snapped the data after 250 people participated in the poll. As you can see, the vast majority of respondents have changed careers several times.
Several people asked if age makes a difference. After all, older people have been in the workforce longer and have had more time to do different stuff. And yes, age matters! But the thing I'm interested this week is not how many people have changed careers. It is whether career changers talk differently than everyone else. I used this poll to look at that question.
For everyone who replied, I grabbed their last 12 months of public LinkedIn posts. That's the data set for this story!
I was curious whether career changers showed up differently in their posts. I analyzed the language in everyone's posts according to several factors:
- Preferred topics
- Corporate content vs. personal content
- Original content vs. reposts
- I vs. we language
- Overall sentiment (optimistic, pessimistic, or neutral)
- Post metadata (length, frequency, engagement patterns)
- ... lots of other stuff
In a couple of significant respects, career changers showed up differently.
Career changers are more opinionated
I classified all posts into three sentiment buckets: optimistic, pessimistic, or neutral. Lots of posts are neutral in sentiment; think webinar announcements, factual commentary, data shares, and so on.
I found that most people across most career change profiles are equal parts optimistic and pessimistic. But once people have had at least three career shifts, something interesting happens: they get a lot less neutral.
People who have had just one or two career eras stay neutral most of the time. By contrast, the career changers spend half their time showing clear optimism or pessimism in what they choose to share.
Career changers show the mess
Because we have to bring AI into everything these days, I wondered if one group was more likely to talk about AI than everyone else. Nope. Everyone is banging on about AI more or less indistinguishably. Lolsob.
But I did find major theme differences in the posts from people with three or more career shifts behind them. People who have changed careers more often talk more openly about their failures and mistakes. They are also far more likely to talk about learning and experimentation, which I found fascinating.
Visualizing the themes with a word cloud is illuminating. Below you can see some examples of language used in posts from people with 3+ career eras. They use the smaller font words just about as often as everyone else. The larger the font, the more often career changers use those words compared to everyone else.
Most of us will change careers at least once
I'm a career changer myself, and I've always been partial to hiring other career changers. This was particularly the case when I was leading an early-stage startup. But I started this series with the POV that there are two ways to build a great career, and I stand by it.
There is a lot to be said for incremental growers, who spend years becoming world-class at their jobs. They build deep expertise brick by brick, execute consistently, and rise through the ranks to senior levels. As we saw in the C-suite data, many of the best incremental growers go on to be successful and influential enterprise executives.
At the same time, career changers bring a tremendous range of experience. Provided they stay put in each career era long enough to meaningfully learn, their broad curiosity is a huge professional asset. This is good news, because the data shows that most of us will change careers at least once in our professional lives.
Kieran
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