Ethan Bernstein is a professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School. He spent five years at The Boston Consulting Group and two years in executive positions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Michael Horn is the author of several books, including the award-winning Disrupting Class, Choosing College, Blended, and From Reopen to Reinvent. He is the cofounder of and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He also teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and cohosts the higher education podcast Future U.
Bob Moesta is the president and founder of the Re-Wired Group, an adjunct lecturer at the Kellog School of Management at Northwestern University, and a research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute.
What’s the big idea?
No job will tick every box on your dream job requirements. It’s important to put in the work to understand what role and environment will provide progress in your career, not perfection. To switch jobs productively and expect job satisfaction, critical steps need to be completed before submitting your application anywhere.
Below, coauthors Ethan, Michael, and Bob share five key insights from their new book, Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. Listen to the audio version—read by Michael and Ethan—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Identify the root causes of why you want to change jobs.
Every year, roughly one billion people change jobs. If you’re like most people, you’re probably switching jobs roughly every four years. Hundreds of millions report that they’re disappointed with the outcome of their switch. Maybe you ended up in a new role and then quit quietly. Maybe you started your next job search just months after starting a new job. Or maybe you’re like the two-thirds of American workers who report to Gallup that they are disengaged in their current jobs.
When most people think about changing jobs, they tend to focus on the features they want, like better hours, less travel, higher pay, a worthier title, faster advancement, greater responsibility, more impact, and more vacation or benefits. All those things sound nice, but such lists rarely help us progress in our careers because they fail to ground us in the true reasons we’re looking for something new. What is actually driving a job move right now?
By using the Jobs to Be Done theory around why people change behavior and studying over a thousand people who have switched jobs, we’ve distilled the forces that cause someone to make a switch. We didn’t just study people who were thinking about changing jobs because bitchin’ ain’t switchin’. People love to complain and think about what could be better. But to understand what really causes these changes meant looking at those who made the switch.
When we looked at the functional, social, and emotional forces that pushed someone to make a job move, we noticed they clustered into four common patterns, which we call quests for progress:
- Get Out. When a person can’t see a way to thrive in their current job or their manager makes it feel like a dead end. They want to escape where they can be supported and challenged.
- Regain Control. When a person feels overwhelmed (or bored) in an aspect of life. They want to find an employer that gives a say in how to allocate time and do work.
- Regain Alignment. When a person’s current employer does not fully value their experience, knowledge, or credentials. They want an environment and role in which they are respected, acknowledged, and reengaged by making full use of their skills.
- Take the Next Step. When a person has reached a career or life milestone and wants an exciting place to move forward and take on more responsibility.
4. Learn to tell your career story effectively.
After you’ve identified your quest and prototyped jobs to figure out what you want to do next, in an ideal world, you would go to the job market and find a no-hassle match. But, like other matchmaking endeavors, finding your next job is never that easy. Part of the reason you have done so much work to get to this point is because what organizations think applicants want isn’t typically the same as what you actually want. As a result, they have trouble attracting the right people and developing them effectively.
You are living in an imperfect world where you will have to translate your prototype into a career narrative that managers and organizations can understand. Learning how to tell that career narrative to the world is critical.
Conventionally, people might have referred to this as an elevator pitch. But most people see an elevator pitch as a chance to sell yourself to others. We’re not trying to make you a salesperson (yet)—we want you to be a storyteller first. Tell the story between the lines of your résumé; share the story spine, not just the highlights. You don’t have to be a born storyteller to craft a good story spine. You can take your cues from one of the best storytellers in the world: Pixar.
“Turning your quest for progress into a story is an effective way to get noticed and be understood.”
In 2011, Emma Coats, a storyboard artist at Pixar, tweeted 22 guidelines to make anyone a better storyteller. Her fourth point about creating a “story spine” to provide narrative structure has received the most sustained attention.
Given that the human brain is wired to learn and retain information through stories, turning your quest for progress into a story is an effective way to get noticed and be understood. The story spine will help you create and tell this story well. In Job Moves, we help you follow a Mad Libs-like template to craft your career story and nail it so that employers understand where you’ve been, and be compelled about where you’re going and why.
Real all 5 steps and the complete Fast Company article