Ask most people who have successfully changed careers about the experience, and there's a reasonable chance they'll describe it as longer and more complicated than they expected. Ask those who gave up partway through, and you'll often hear a different version: they expected it to be quicker and easier, were disappointed by the pace, and eventually concluded that it wasn't working.
The mismatch between expectation and reality is one of the most consistent patterns in adult career transition — and it's one that the broader discourse around career change does very little to address. The narrative of rapid professional reinvention is compelling and commercially useful for those who sell education products. It also sets people up to misinterpret the normal pace of meaningful change as evidence of failure.
This article presents a different kind of roadmap — one that acknowledges how career transitions actually tend to unfold, and offers a framework for planning one that is grounded in that reality rather than in the promotional version.
Why "Fast" Career Changes Usually Aren't
When someone describes having "changed careers in three months", it's worth asking what that actually means. In most cases, what happened is that someone moved into a junior or entry-level role in a new field — often at a lower salary than before — after completing a short course or bootcamp. What follows is usually several more years of building actual expertise, credibility, and the kind of practical experience that enables real professional progression in that field.
That's not a criticism of those individuals. Entry-level roles in new fields are perfectly legitimate starting points. The issue is when the "three months" is presented as the whole story — giving people a timeline expectation that doesn't account for everything that comes after the initial transition. The real career change, in most cases, takes years rather than months to complete in any meaningful sense.
Understanding this upfront doesn't make the process slower. It makes it less likely to feel like failure when you're six months in and still building foundational knowledge, twelve months in and in a role that doesn't yet reflect your full capability, eighteen months in and still learning. These are all normal positions on a genuine trajectory.
Phase One: Foundations (Months 1–3)
The first phase of a realistic career change roadmap is almost entirely about information gathering and honest self-examination — not about taking action in the world, and not yet about enrolling in courses or updating your CV.
This phase should produce honest answers to a small number of genuinely important questions. What, specifically, are you trying to move away from, and what are you trying to move towards? What do you actually know about what working in your target field involves day-to-day — not from promotional content, but from people who do it and from real job market data? What is the genuine gap between where you are now and where you need to be? And what are the real constraints on your transition: financial, time-related, geographical, or family-related?
This phase is often underinvested because it feels less like progress than doing things does. But skipping it — or rushing through it — is one of the most common reasons career change attempts stall further down the line. Decisions made without this foundation tend to require painful correction later, at greater cost.
The most useful thing you can do in the first three months of planning a career change is to become genuinely well-informed about the territory. That is worth more than any course you could start in the same period.
Phase Two: Targeted Skill Development (Months 3–12)
Once you have a clearer picture of your target direction and the gap between where you are and where you need to be, you're in a position to invest in learning strategically rather than speculatively.
The word "strategically" matters here. It means learning that is specifically targeted at the gap you've identified, rather than consuming broadly on the topic because it feels productive. It means making deliberate choices about what to study, in what order, and through what kind of learning approach — rather than defaulting to whatever is most prominently marketed.
This phase typically involves some structured learning alongside the beginning of practical application. For most fields, practical application can and should start earlier than people often assume. You don't need to have completed a course before beginning to do the work at a small scale — writing, designing, building, analysing, communicating, whatever the work actually involves.
A common mistake at this stage is treating learning as something that must be completed before doing becomes appropriate. In reality, doing and learning are most effective when they're happening simultaneously and reinforcing one another. The work you produce early on doesn't need to be polished — it needs to be real, so that the learning has somewhere to land.
Phase Three: Building Credibility (Months 6–18)
Credibility in a new field is built through evidence — and evidence is built through work. This phase is concerned with beginning to produce genuine work product in your target area and making it visible in appropriate ways.
For some people this means taking on freelance or voluntary work. For others it means building a portfolio through personal projects. For others still it might mean taking on adjacent responsibilities in their current role, or contributing to their target field through writing, community involvement, or professional networking.
The important thing is that this phase is about output, not just input. Certificates and completed courses have their place, but they're worth less than demonstrated capability. Employers in most fields are primarily interested in evidence that you can do the work — and that evidence comes from having done it, not merely from having studied it.
This phase also tends to be where people encounter the first genuinely difficult reality of career transition: being evaluated as a beginner in a field where they may be an experienced, capable professional in other respects. This is uncomfortable. It requires a particular kind of patience — the ability to hold in mind your competence in your previous context and your current inexperience in your new one, without allowing either to define you entirely.
Phase Four: The Transition Itself (Months 12–24+)
The actual transition — moving into paid work in your new area — tends to happen during this phase, though the exact timing varies significantly depending on the distance between your starting point and your target, the pace of your skill development, and market conditions in your chosen field.
It's worth being honest about what "the transition" actually looks like in most cases. It rarely involves moving directly into a senior or well-compensated role in a new field. More often it involves an entry-level or junior position, a period of proving yourself to a new employer in a new context, and a gradual rebuilding of the professional standing you may have had in your previous field. This is the cost of moving into a new area — and it's one worth understanding and accepting before committing to the path, rather than discovering with disappointment once you're in it.
Phase Five: Consolidation (Year Two Onwards)
Career change doesn't end with getting a new role. In many ways, the most demanding phase begins at that point — navigating the learning curve of a new job in a new industry, potentially in a new kind of organisation, while continuing to develop skills and build professional relationships from scratch.
People who plan their career change thinking about the transition as the finish line often find this phase significantly more difficult than anticipated. Those who plan with the understanding that the transition is a milestone within a longer journey tend to approach it more sustainably.
Consolidation involves deepening the skills developed during earlier phases, adding new layers of domain knowledge and practical experience, and gradually building the kind of professional track record that opens doors to more interesting and better-compensated work. This process takes years — and it is genuinely rewarding, provided your expectations accommodate the reality of what it involves.
Managing the Financial Dimension
Career change often has real financial implications that are underaddressed in the general conversation about professional transition. The costs are potentially multiple: the direct cost of education or training; the cost of reduced income during a transition to a junior role; the opportunity cost of time invested in learning; and in some cases, the impact on pension contributions or other financial structures tied to current employment.
None of this is meant to discourage anyone from pursuing a career change. It's meant to encourage planning that takes these factors seriously. Decisions made without acknowledging the financial dimension can create pressures that force people to abandon a transition they were making genuine progress with — simply because the financial runway ran out before the transition was complete.
Understanding the financial shape of your transition — and having a realistic plan to manage it — is as important as any learning plan you might put in place.
The Role of Support and Accountability
Career transitions are lonely in ways that are easy to underestimate. You're doing something that people around you may not fully understand, at a pace that doesn't produce visible results for extended periods, in a context where the usual markers of professional progress and recognition are temporarily absent.
The value of having some form of support during this process — whether from a mentor, a peer in a similar position, a structured programme that provides community and feedback, or simply from people in your personal life who understand what you're attempting — is hard to overstate.
Accountability — having some mechanism that keeps you moving forward during periods when motivation is low — is equally valuable. The format matters less than the fact of having something that creates a degree of commitment beyond your own internal resolve. Internal resolve, on its own, tends to fluctuate with circumstance.
What to Do When Progress Stalls
Every career transition experiences periods of stall. Progress plateaus, motivation dips, or external circumstances interrupt the rhythm of learning and development. This is entirely normal, and it's worth having a plan for it before it happens.
The most common mistake when progress stalls is to interpret it as evidence that the direction was wrong or that the project has failed. In most cases, stalling reflects normal human variation in energy and motivation, or the impact of external circumstances, rather than anything more fundamental. The appropriate response is usually a modest recalibration — perhaps reducing the pace of learning temporarily, revisiting your reasons for pursuing the change, or getting honest feedback about where you actually are — rather than abandonment.
It's also worth being honest with yourself, periodically, about whether the direction you identified in Phase One is still the right one. New information gathered along the way sometimes warrants a genuine revision of the destination. Updating your direction based on what you learn during the process is intelligent, not inconsistent.
Closing Thoughts
The framework presented here is deliberately unglamorous. It doesn't promise a quick route to a new career, a specific salary, or a guaranteed outcome. It offers something more useful: an honest account of the terrain, and a structure for navigating it in a way that's proportionate to its actual complexity.
Career change is genuinely possible for adults at most life stages. It takes sustained effort, honest self-assessment, strategic investment in learning, and a tolerance for the slow, often invisible kind of progress that characterises meaningful change. It rarely happens in the way the promotional version suggests. When it happens well, it happens because someone planned carefully, invested consistently, and stayed the course through the genuinely difficult stretches.
If you'd like to discuss your own transition with someone who will give you an honest assessment rather than a sales pitch, the Dexivano team is available via the contact page. That conversation is free, and there's no obligation to enrol in anything.