Considering a Completely Different Career After a Layoff

A layoff forces a decision that a man might otherwise have put off indefinitely: whether the next job should look like the last one, or whether this unwanted pause is actually an opening to consider something that was quietly being considered anyway, long before any layoff made the question unavoidable.

Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior who has spent much of her career at London Business School, INSEAD, and Harvard Business School studying exactly this kind of transition, found something that ran against the conventional advice about career change. The usual guidance holds that a person should figure out what they really want first, then go pursue it. Ibarra's research on professionals actually going through career reinvention found the opposite sequence tends to work better in practice: clarity is usually the result of trying things, not the prerequisite for trying them.

Ibarra describes what a person is deciding between during a transition not as one true, hidden self waiting to be discovered, but as a set of possible selves, plausible future versions of a working life, some closer to the present and some more distant, that only become real enough to evaluate once they are actually tested in some small way rather than only imagined.

Her research identified three concrete strategies successful career changers tend to use. The first is experimenting directly, taking on a small project, a course, or a volunteer role in an adjacent field rather than waiting for a fully formed plan before acting at all. The second is deliberately building new networks in the direction being considered, since people already in a field provide information and legitimacy no amount of solo research can replicate. The third is crafting a coherent story, over time, about how the pieces of a winding path actually connect, which tends to only become clear looking backward rather than something that can be planned out fully in advance.

Her research identified three concrete strategies successful career changers tend to use.

A key part of Ibarra's framework is what she calls identity experiments: small, genuinely low stakes tests, a single consulting project, an informational interview, a short course, rather than a single irreversible leap. Each small win from one of these experiments does real work, both generating actual information about whether a direction fits and building the confidence needed to consider a bigger step, which a purely internal, hypothetical weighing of pros and cons rarely produces on its own.

Ibarra also names something worth expecting in advance: a period she describes as a messy middle, a stretch after the old identity has loosened but before a new one has solidified, that tends to feel confusing and directionless from the inside even when real progress is quietly being made. Knowing this phase is a normal, well documented part of the process, rather than a sign that the whole endeavor was a mistake, makes it considerably easier to stay with it rather than retreating back to the most familiar option out of discomfort alone.

A layoff, as unwelcome as it is, creates a specific kind of opening for this that voluntarily quitting a stable job rarely does. There is no existing job to feel disloyal for leaving, no comfortable status quo pulling against the pull toward something different. The pause, however involuntary, is already happening, which makes it a genuinely good moment to run a low stakes experiment or two rather than pouring every hour exclusively into a search for the most similar available replacement.

This is worth balancing carefully against the real financial pressures a layoff also creates. Exploring a possible new direction does not mean abandoning practical income needs in the meantime, and for most men, the two can run in parallel: continuing an active search in a familiar field while also testing, in small and genuinely low cost ways, whether a different direction is worth pursuing further.

Not every layoff should become a full career reinvention, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to return to familiar work. But for the version of this decision that was already quietly being considered before any layoff happened, an unwanted pause is sometimes the only moment that actually makes space to test it, rather than one more year of deferring the question indefinitely.