How to choose your next career move

Start with the question under the question

Choose your next move by working out what you want more of and what you want less of, then testing which roles actually change those two things. The job title is the last decision, not the first. Most people start with titles and get stuck, because a title hides the daily work it commits you to.

Write two short lists. What parts of this week would you keep? What parts would you drop if you could? Three items each is plenty. Those six lines do more work than a year of browsing adverts, because they describe the job you are trying to find rather than the label on it.

A move is usually a change of occupation

It helps to know how common a real change is. Indeed Hiring Lab analysed its UK users with an uploaded CV between 2022 and mid 2025. About 2.4 per cent change jobs in a given month, and around 63 per cent of those move into a different occupation rather than the same work somewhere else.

So the usual move is not a sideways step. Most people who move are changing the work itself. That should be reassuring if you are considering something different, and a warning if you assume your experience transfers automatically. It transfers when you can show what in it applies, which is a thing you have to prepare.

Test a direction before you commit

A direction you have only thought about is a guess. Turn it into something you can check in a fortnight. Pick the two routes you find most plausible and set each of them a small, cheap test with a date on it.

The point of a test is to find the thing you did not know. Most directions fail on something mundane, such as the hours, the travel, or the part of the work that nobody mentions in the advert. Better to meet that now than nine months into the wrong role.

• Talk to two people doing the work now, and ask what their worst week looks like.
• Read five recent adverts and list the requirements you cannot evidence.
• Do a small piece of the work, as a project, a cover arrangement or a volunteer task.
• Put a number on the practical cost: pay, travel, hours, qualification time.
• Write down what would have to be true for this to be a good decision.

Check the evidence you can actually show

Every route has a gap between what you have done and what the role asks for. Name it precisely. A gap you can close with one project this term is a different proposition from one that needs two years and a qualification.

Be careful to separate what you have done from what you have been near. You may have sat in budget meetings for five years without ever having held a budget. A reader will ask which it was, so decide now what your honest answer is and what you would do to change it.

Decide what the next step is, not the destination

You do not need a five year plan. You need the next move to be reversible, informative and small enough to make. A good next step teaches you something about the direction whether or not you continue with it.

Give yourself a review date rather than a deadline. Three months is usually right. If the two lists you wrote at the start have not changed by then, you have learned something about the direction. If they have, start again from the new ones.

Keep the reasoning, not just the decision

Write down why you chose what you chose, in four or five lines. Future you will not remember, and the reasoning is what you will need when the next decision comes round.

A Pathways report in OTO Careers does this from your record: three routes worth investigating, the evidence behind each one, and the questions to check. They are options to test, not predictions. Whatever you use, the habit is the same. Keep the thinking as well as the outcome.