You’ve changed roles before. Changed companies. Maybe even changed industries.
And yet somehow you keep ending up in the same place. Same frustration, different desk.
If that pattern sounds familiar, there’s a question you need to sit with before you update your CV again: is it the job, or is it you?
I don’t mean that in a blame-y way. I mean it as a genuine, useful question. Because the answer changes everything about what to do next.
The pattern nobody talks about
I’ve worked with hundreds of career changers and one of the most common things I see is someone who’s on their third or fourth job in five years, each time convinced that this move will be the one that fixes it.
They start their new role feeling genuinely excited! New company, new title, new team!
But slowly the frustration creeps back in. The restlessness. The Sunday dread. The boredom and sense of “is this really it?”
And the instinct is always the same: this must be the wrong job. Let me find a better one.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth.
Sometimes the job IS the problem, but sometimes, you are the problem….. Or more accurately, the criteria you’re using to choose your next job is the problem.
Three questions to help you figure out which one it is
I use these with my clients before we do anything else. Before CVs, before LinkedIn, before applications, because without this clarity, everything else is guesswork.
1.How are you actually wired?
I call this your Internal Design. Not your values on paper, or the ones you think you should have, but the way you’re fundamentally built to work.
Do you need autonomy or structure? Do you thrive in chaos or calm? Do you need variety or consistency? Are you energised by people or drained by them?
If you’re in a role that works against your design, no amount of salary or status will make it feel right.
2. What matters most to you right now?
I call this your Current Driver. And the key word is “current.”
What drove you at 25 is probably not what drives you at 40. Stability, growth, freedom, money, time, impact, creativity… these shift across life stages, and that’s completely normal.
The problem is when you’re still chasing last decade’s driver. When you’re optimising for salary because that’s what mattered when you had a mortgage to sort out, but actually what you need now is meaning.
3. Are you holding out for “the one”?
There is no one perfect job. Just like there’s no one perfect partner, no one perfect city, no one perfect anything.
What there IS, once you understand your design and your driver, is a menu of genuinely good options. Roles that fit who you are now, not who you were five years ago.
The people who keep changing jobs without finding satisfaction are usually the ones looking for a perfect role that doesn’t exist, instead of a great role that does.
So is it the job, or is it you?
If your answers to those three questions keep pointing to the same environmental problems regardless of the company, it’s probably not the job. It’s a pattern in how you choose.
If your answers genuinely shift depending on the role, and there are specific things about this particular job that clash with your design and your driver, then it probably is this job. And changing makes sense.
Either way, you now know what to look for next time. And that’s the difference between a strategic career move and a panicked escape.
What to do next
Before you open another job board tab, try this:
Write down what your ideal Tuesday looks like. Not Monday (too loaded). Not Friday (too easy). Tuesday. A normal, unremarkable Tuesday.
What are you doing? Who are you working with? What kind of problems are you solving? How do you feel at 3pm?
If your current Tuesday looks nothing like what you wrote down, you know something needs to change, and now you have a much better idea of what to change it to!
If you want help working through this properly, that’s exactly what my programme is designed for. Book a free exploratory call with me here