Changing Your Career Isn’t Easy

A career change is a risk, and the people who care about you tend to project their fears onto you. They don’t want to watch you struggle or fail, so they discourage you or just don’t offer much enthusiasm.

Right now is a strange time to be in engineering, or knowledge work in general. Plenty of us are excited about what AI means for our jobs. More of us are nervous, and I think that fear is justified. Employment for entry-level software developers has fallen nearly 20 percent since late 2022, according to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index, and it can feel like the knowledge we spent our careers building is being commoditized.

Lately I’ve seen a flood of social media content telling software developers to go into the trades. YouTubers are telling you to become a plumber or a goat herder.

But before you do that, I want to warn you, there is no EASY path. Even if you want to become a goat herder.

I’ve changed careers once so far, but my business has forced me through several pivots that felt a lot like career changes—new audiences, new skills, new identity. Here’s what I’d tell anyone considering a change, whether you’re moving into engineering, leaving it, or finding a new speciality.

Find someone who’s done it and ask how

Read the full article at spectrum.ieee.org