Change your Career Path Perspective with a Line Drawing

Over a decade ago, right before I turned 30 I was in the middle of a job change and a move. My new team scheduled me to take one of those expensive proprietary ability tests that tells you what jobs or roles you are best suited for as a team-bonding exercise. The test was lengthy, producing a thick comb-bound report peppered with colorful charts that the test administrator expounded upon in a two-hour-long summary session.

I remember feeling overloaded listening to her report analysis. I thought ahead about trying to start a family, wondering how that would work into this newly-found career advice. I thought back to friends who graduated straight into their professional careers when I did not, and worried whether this next step was the right one on a seemingly single-track career path. My increasing panic must have shown because she stopped, pushing the binder aside and pulled out a piece of paper and a pen. She began to share a perspective-shifting line drawing that changed the way I saw the arc of my career path and calmed my rampant thoughts.

Getting to the aha!

You know that moment when you see something differently? I can tell you what you probably do — you sit back in your seat, your eyes widen a bit, you might nod or say ‘huh’ or ‘aha!’. I know this because every time I’ve walked through the same line drawing exercise with someone, this is the reaction they have. I’ve had the honor of listening to peoples’ stories of job exploration and uncertainty and the most consistently impactful experience has been this line drawing. Even years after, some have greeted me with, “Remember that drawing we did? I still think about it!”

I am not a career counselor, far from it if you note my circuitous professional life. I do, however, relish helping people and freely sharing good advice I’ve been fortunate to receive. And I’d love to share this line drawing exercise with you!

Let’s get drawing.

Grab a piece of paper, pen or pencil and draw a long line across the page. This will be your life timeline. Underneath, at the beginning of the line write a zero, and at the end of the line write a number that represents the age you think you’ll live to. Sounds a little macabre, but I assure you this is an uplifting exercise not a dreadful task. Between ‘birth’ and ‘death’, demarcate the division of time with little lines and write the corresponding ages underneath.

Once you’ve filled out the timeline, write an X on the age you are now.

Here’s where you’ll need to pause and think before you write anything else. There is a second X. The second X should go on the specific age you began to have full agency over your life. Remember don’t write anything yet! Let’s look at how others have answered this question and consider their reasoning to help inform your decision.

Some of my friends determined their second X was in their mid teens because they had to take on great responsibility earlier in life. Others determined their coming of age occurred at graduating high school at 18, and others felt that graduating college at 21 was a more accurate turning point for them. When I first did this exercise, I placed my second X at 24. One of the unearned privileges I’ve benefited from was my parents paying for undergrad and co-signing my rental applications until I made enough money to qualify (read here for Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s explanation of privilege).

Back to you. What age did you truly call your own shots? Mark down the second X over that number. Now, highlight the space between the two Xs. Reflect on how long or short that distance is.

So when’s the big perspective shift, the ‘aha!’ moment? This next part is where I hope the coin drops for you like it did for me.

There is time.

On your line, look at the distance from the second X to the end. There is time. Whether you are Gen Z, Millennial, Xennial, GenX, a Boomer, or a member of the Silent Generation, there is time. There is time to do something new, more, different — in our personal and our professional lives. This is the part of the exercise where eyes widen and we sit back in our seats. We then take a breath and dig into shifting our perspectives further.

So what is possible with that time? Experts say that we will have an average of five careers in our lives. It’s actually difficult to validate career count with data so let’s look at what we can know — the average number of jobs we can expect to have in our lives. The United States Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS), published a report in August 2019 that looked at the average number of jobs held from age 18 to 52 by a specific generational subset, “younger baby boomers”. Men in this group held an average of 12.5 jobs and women held 12.1 jobs. Another BLS report in September 2018 looked at the average length of time people work in their job, known as tenure. Median employee tenure was 4.3 years for men and 4.0 years for women.

A new story.

What does this all mean for us? We can expect that every 4-ish years we will, on average, have a new job and we can reasonably extrapolate that those jobs will span multiple careers. Look again at the space between your second X and the end of your line. There is time. We can shed the single-track career path myth and embrace the reality that we can and will likely reinvent our careers over the course of our lives. The ‘next step’ on your career path isn’t linear. Wherever you are right now in your work, job, career, there is time for a pivot however dramatic or simple. You can begin your new story equipped with this line-drawing perspective, I know you can do it!

For the data divers.

If you like digging deeper, you can read the BLS “Number of Jobs Held, Labor Market Activity, and Earnings Growth among the Youngest Baby Boomers: Results from a Longitudinal Survey” here. And you can read the BLS “Employee Tenure” release here to see the data sliced across various population demographics.