Blog Author
Lars Moeller is a passionate Consultant, seasoned Executive and Entrepreneur with more than 25 years of professional experience. His company founded in 2014 creates tailored solutions for clients in a broad range of industries – developing leaders and building dynamic, sustainable management teams. His recent work focuses on the successful recruitment of Department Heads, Business Unit Leaders and Principal Consultants in practices like Strategy, Finance, Technology, Operations, Sales, HR and Legal. Lars holds a degree in electrical engineering followed by an Executive MBA in Entrepreneurial Management. As HR Council at SwissMBAs he offers free HR Q&A Sessions for its Members.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lars-moeller-794a8a69/
Recent studies show that around 65% of employees in Switzerland are planning a job change within the next 12 months. However, actual turnover in Switzerland is only about 8–12% per year. This suggests that roughly 50% of employees find themselves in a dilemma, lacking a clear strategy on how to initiate and execute a career transition. It's therefore very likely that you've already thought about it too — perhaps because you feel stuck in your career and/or work in an environment where you don't really want to be.
This blog is intended to provide a 3-step guidance by sharing insights gained from thousands of interviews over the last 25 years of professional experience, including more than a decade as an independent entrepreneur specializing in Leadership Advisory and Executive Search. It highlights how successful leaders assess and, when necessary, realign their career path to ensure ongoing professional growth and satisfaction.
The initial step is to clarify your true professional objectives.
Conduct a thorough analysis of your past experiences, both positive and negative, across various roles and responsibilities. It is crucial to identify which situations must be avoided in the future and specify areas for improvement. This process requires honest self-reflection, including an assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, as well as learning from mistakes encountered in your immediate work environment. Effective transformation depends on gaining these insights, motivated by the commitment to prevent similar negative events from recurring. It’s a fact that avoiding negative situations has in most cases a more enduring impact on long-term job satisfaction than simply emphasizing positive aspects while neglecting the downsides of a current job.
Why are wrong career decisions made? Here are the top three reasons:
1. Insufficient analysis of own needs in terms of what makes me happy, what makes me unhappy, what motivates me, what drives me.
2. Missing timely engagement with the labor market. Tendency to endure an unsatisfactory professional situation, driven by the hope that conditions will improve on their own over time.
3. Influenced by external factors. Taking on a new task or role imposed by the current employer. Change of employment by following supervisors or team members without a solid impact analysis for yourself (e.g. team deals). Persuaded by negative media reports, or forced by family and friends to change position.
The second step is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the various aspects of your job.
Make your job evaluation and divide it into two categories: job content (your duties and responsibilities) and job context (your working environment). Assess each aspect based on its impact on your satisfaction and the importance to you, using for each aspect a scale from 1 to 10. This will help you to quantify how significant each aspect influences your job satisfaction and how crucial the aspect is in your role. Examples of job content include i.e.: meetings and interactions with colleagues, research and task analysis, content creation, result presentation, decision-making, team leadership, administrative duties, stakeholder management, etc. Examples of job context encompass your direct report (supervisor), the team, company brand, firm reputation, ESG factors, working conditions, work-life balance, salary, corporate culture, commute time, etc.
The evaluation of the context and content aspects of your current job can be visualized in the following “Satisfaction versus Importance” assessment matrix:
The following chart allows you to visualize where your current job falls within the “Content versus Context” framework. The results will help you to determine the possible direction of a future job move and gives you a solid basis for a deeper analysis and discussion whether a job change is truly necessary or not. Finding yourself in the upper right corner, make sure you have the right answer to the question “Why change?”. It is important to remember that nobody is perfect, and this principle also applies for your current (and future) working environment.
In the third step you create a comprehensive overview of all relevant job options.
Evaluate the content and context aspects of each job opportunity described in the job advertisement as well as those gained in recruitment interviews in terms of their impact on your professional satisfaction. Additionally, assess each job option in relation to your current skills and the effort required to meet the qualifications of your dream job.
Job changes are among the most important decisions we make in life.
In addition to gathering solid information about the content and context aspects of a future position, emotional aspects should not be ignored when it comes to long-term professional success and satisfaction. Dealing with such a transition requires time, effort and emotional investment. To take the emotional aspects into account, follow your instincts and ask yourself the following questions:
- How do I feel when thinking of working for this company / in this job?
- Did I feel comfortable when entering the company’s building?
- How did I feel during the recruiting process or taking interviews?
- Are the values and the company culture aligned with my personal preferences?
Final takeaways:
1. Stay vigilant, keep curious, remain open-minded and never be too tired to take the chance to discuss new business or job opportunities.
2. Know your BATNA, your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement.
3. Don't wait until frustration or an organizational change forces you to act.
4. Follow the principle of Henry Ford, who said: “I consider every offer — it could be the opportunity of a lifetime.
