What do you want to do next in your career?
I’ve asked this question countless times to clients, friends, and other people who are thinking about their careers. Sometimes the answer comes quickly. Other times, people look at me and say, “I have absolutely no idea.”
It can actually be a pretty scary moment when people don’t know how to answer it.
That’s okay. In fact, it’s more common than you might think.
But when someone tells me they don’t know what they want, I often ask a different question: What don’t you want?
Suddenly, the conversation can become much easier.
Maybe you know you don’t want another manager like the one you have now. You don’t want to sit in meetings all day. You don’t want to spend your time doing maintenance work that leaves you feeling underutilized. You don’t want to manage people. You don’t want another job that takes over your life and leaves little time for your family.
You may not have a clear picture of your next career move, but that list tells you something important.
You’re not starting from zero.
Welcome to the Messy Middle
There’s a space I often call the messy middle.
It’s the place between where you are now and where you want to go. You’ve realized that your current situation doesn’t fit anymore, but you haven’t figured out exactly what comes next.
Maybe you feel underpaid, undervalued, or underutilized. Maybe you’ve stopped growing. Maybe your work no longer gives you the energy or satisfaction it once did. You know something needs to change, but you don’t yet know what the better option looks like.
That uncertainty can be uncomfortable.
For engineers in particular, there can be a strong temptation to treat the problem like a technical one. Give me the requirements. Show me the available options. Let’s build a decision matrix, evaluate the variables, and identify the optimal solution.
There’s nothing wrong with being analytical. Those skills are incredibly valuable. But careers don’t always give us enough information to make a perfectly informed decision upfront.
You often have to move before you have complete clarity.
Clarity isn’t something you simply think your way into. It’s something you act your way into.
That means you may need to explore, experiment, learn, and adjust before you know exactly where you’re going.
1. Collect the Clues
If you don’t know what you want next, start paying attention to what you already know about yourself.
Your career has probably given you clues about the kinds of work that energize you, the environments where you perform well, and the problems you naturally enjoy solving. You may not have connected those clues yet.
Start asking yourself questions such as:
- When have I felt most energized at work?
- What projects have I enjoyed the most?
- Who do I envy professionally, and what specifically about their career attracts me?
- What problems do I naturally gravitate toward?
- What do people consistently ask me for help with?
- What kinds of work make me lose track of time?
- When have I felt like I was doing some of my best work?
Pay attention to patterns.
Maybe you discover that you consistently enjoy solving complex technical problems. Maybe you love mentoring other engineers. Maybe you enjoy taking ambiguous problems and creating structure. Maybe you discover that you care deeply about the people you work with or the impact your work has on the world.
These observations are clues. The goal at this stage is to become more curious about yourself and the kinds of work that bring out your strengths.
2. Run Experiments
Once you start collecting clues, the next step is to test them.
This is where career experimentation becomes incredibly useful.
Suppose you think you might enjoy working in a different industry. You could quit your job and hope the new industry is everything you imagined. Or you could start gathering information before making a major decision.
Talk to people who already work in that field. Ask them about their experience. Find out what the work is actually like. Look for opportunities to contribute to a project that exposes you to that type of work.
You can also experiment with leadership, mentoring, volunteering, or new responsibilities within your current environment.
For example, you might:
- Take on a project that gives you an opportunity to lead.
- Mentor an intern or junior engineer.
- Volunteer for a leadership role in your community.
- Have informational interviews with people in careers that interest you.
- Take on a project that allows you to use a skill you want to develop.
- Spend time learning about an industry before deciding whether you want to pursue it.
Think about this the way you might think about engineering design. You don’t always build the final version first. You create a prototype, test it, collect data, and learn from the results.
You can do something similar with your career.
The purpose of an experiment is to collect data through experiences – all of it is valid. Sometimes an experiment tells you that an option you were considering isn’t right for you. That’s useful information too.
3. Stop Demanding Certainty
One of the hardest parts of navigating the messy middle is accepting that you may never have complete certainty before taking action.
Psychologist Virginia Satir said, “Many people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.”
That idea has stuck with me because uncertainty can be so uncomfortable that we sometimes choose situations we already know are wrong simply because they feel familiar.
You don’t need to know exactly where your career will be 30 years from now (I believe that is basically impossible).
You don’t need a perfectly mapped-out career plan that accounts for every possible change in technology, industry, family circumstances, or personal priorities.
You need enough clarity to take the next step.
Then you take another step.
You learn something.
You adjust.
You take another step.
That’s what intentionality looks like in a career. You’re choosing and acting based on what you know, paying attention to what you learn, and using that information to make better decisions as you move forward.
Your Career is an Iterative Process
Not every experiment will work.
You may pursue something that looks promising and discover that you don’t actually enjoy it. You may take on a project and realize that the type of work isn’t a good fit. You may have conversations with people in an industry and decide you don’t want to go there after all.
This is meaningful data!
The important thing is to remain engaged in the process rather than drifting from one opportunity to another without understanding why you’re making your decisions.
If you know what you don’t want, use that information. If you have clues about what energizes you, investigate them. If something interests you, run an experiment and learn from the result.
You may not (yet) have a complete answer to the question, “What do I want to do next?”
That’s okay.
Start with what you know. Get curious about what you don’t know. Pay attention to the clues. Try things. Learn from what happens.
Just choose the next step intentionally.
Watch more in the video below:
