Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface

APPENDIX Studying Career Transitions

While career reinvention is by no means a new phenomenon—we can look to Dante Alighieri, who wrote the Divine Comedy at forty, and Paul Gauguin, who quit his career as a stockbroker and fled to Tahiti to become a painter—and much how-to advice is given, few have applied the methods of scientific rigor to the study of how people change careers.

“How” one changes careers is a very different question from “when” or “with what frequency within a given population.” It is also a different question from “What antecedent factors—for example, personality, IQ, risk profile, or quality of network—make the process go faster or more smoothly?” This book broke new ground by simply focusing on the “how” question and ...