How to tell if it’s time for a career pivot

Most people never change careers, which is remarkable when you consider how little evidence most of us had when we chose our first one.

For many professionals, early career decisions are shaped less by talent or long-term fit than by convenience and coincidence. We follow friends into certain degrees, accept the first decent offer, listen to family advice, or pursue interests that feel meaningful at 18 but prove less durable at 38. These choices are understandable, but they are weak predictors of where our strengths will compound over time, or of what will sustain both performance and satisfaction across decades of work. In essence, we follow our own or other people’s intuition rather than facts or data, which is rarely a recipe for success.

The problem is further compounded by how fast the ground has shifted, especially over the past decades.

Even before the rise of generative AI, career predictability had been steadily eroding. Globalization, repeated economic shocks, declining job tenure, the collapse of clear promotion ladders, and the shift from stable organizational careers to project-based and boundary-less work all contributed to rising uncertainty. Longitudinal labor data shows that occupational half-lives were shrinking well before automation became a mainstream concern, with entire roles emerging and disappearing within a decade. In parallel, individuals were expected to manage their own employability, continuously update skills, and absorb risks once carried by employers or institutions.

AI has not created this uncertainty so much as amplified it, accelerating the obsolescence of skills, compressing career ladders, and blurring professional boundaries. Knowledge and technical expertise, once reliable sources of differentiation, are increasingly commoditized. At the same time, employers place growing value on judgment, learning agility, influence, and curiosity, capabilities that universities still struggle to measure or systematically develop. The result is a widening gap between what people trained for, what they are good at, and what the labor market actually rewards.

It is therefore no surprise that career anxiety is rising, even among people who appear successful on paper. Gallup data shows that roughly 60% of employees feel emotionally detached at work, while fewer than one in four strongly believe their job aligns with their strengths. LinkedIn data consistently finds that the average worker will change roles every three to four years, yet meaningful career pivots remain rare and often delayed until dissatisfaction becomes acute.

At the same time, mobility has slowed. After the Great Resignation came what economists now call the Big Stay: people feel stuck rather than settled. They are rethinking their careers cognitively, but postponing action behaviorally. In other words, “job hugging” has replaced “job hopping”.

So how can you tell whether you are merely going through a rough patch or whether it is genuinely time for a career pivot? Decades of research on career development, identity, and motivation point to four reliable signals.

1. Your learning has stalled, not just your motivation

One of the most robust predictors of engagement and career satisfaction is perceived progress. When people feel they are learning, they tolerate stress and uncertainty better. When learning stops, even high performers disengage.

Professor Herminia Ibarra’s research on career transitions shows that people rarely pivot successfully through introspection alone. Clarity follows action, not the other way around. If your role no longer exposes you to new skills, perspectives, or problems, that is not a temporary slump but a structural constraint. Before quitting outright, experiment: Be ready to fail smart, in the sense of learning from your experience and becoming wiser as a consequence. As the saying goes, “experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted to get”. For example, take on side projects, advisory roles, or temporary assignments that test alternative identities. Stagnation becomes dangerous only when experimentation stops.

2. Your strengths no longer translate into value

Many careers falter not because people lose competence, but because the market stops rewarding what they are good at. Technological change makes this especially common. Skills that once differentiated professionals are automated, standardized, or absorbed into platforms. As I have illustrated in one of my previous books, AI is far more likely to automate tasks within jobs—changing the skills constellation needed to perform them—than actual jobs.

Research on person–job fit shows that sustained misalignment between strengths and role predicts burnout and underperformance, even among conscientious high achievers. A useful diagnostic question is whether your best contributions still feel essential or merely adequate. Successful pivots rarely involve abandoning strengths. They involve redeploying them where they matter more.

3. Your career identity has become rigid

Ibarra’s work highlights that career change is as much an identity transition as a skills transition. People delay pivots not because they lack options, but because they are overly attached to who they think they are supposed to be. This is also why authenticity is overrated: Why limit yourself to your past and present self when you can instead create or sculpt a broader, more diverse, and richer version of yourself?

This is where the “squiggly careers” concept, popularized by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis of Amazing If, is especially useful. Modern careers are no longer linear ladders but adaptive paths, shaped by lateral moves, pauses, reinventions, and redefinitions of success. If you feel compelled to defend your current title, industry, or trajectory rather than evolve it, you may be protecting a legacy identity rather than building a future one. Indeed, progress is not a straight line!

4. You are succeeding externally but disengaging internally

One of the most overlooked signals is sustained performance paired with declining well-being. Longitudinal studies show that people can maintain output for years after motivation erodes, but at a cost to health, creativity, and long-term employability.

If your reputation is strong but your curiosity, energy, or sense of meaning is steadily diminishing, that is not ingratitude. It is misalignment. Career satisfaction is not a soft outcome. It is a leading indicator of future performance and adaptability.

In short, we tend to romanticize career pivots as bold acts of reinvention. But the evidence suggests the opposite. Successful pivots usually happen through small, low-risk experiments that reshape identity over time, guided less by passion than by a disciplined willingness to revise assumptions in response to reality.

In an era where work will change repeatedly, the real risk is not changing direction too often, but staying in place long after the signals suggest you should move. The most resilient professionals are not those with fixed plans, but those who know when the cost of standing still has quietly begun to exceed the cost of change.