Holistic elements make or break career transitions
Career transitions have the greatest chance of success when employees view their work and personal lives holistically, research into large-scale outplacements shows.
After working in HR for more than 25 years at a number of large organisations, Amalia Chilianis says career planning "cannot be in isolation from the rest of your life".
"It's like creating a diamond to only look at one facet, and then wondering why it looks dull and lacklustre," she says in her new book, Work-a-holistic.
During her time at Holden, Chilianis designed a support program to help transition employees who were affected by the company's manufacturing and engineering closures, and she notes that "almost 90% of around 3000 staff participated and successfully secured gainful employment, many into completely new careers".
Interviewing some of the participants afterwards, she found it was not redundancy payments or jobseeking assistance that helped the most in successful transitions.
Conducting further research using psychology and neuroscience, she found there are multiple paths to success, but overall, a holistic approach is required.
Pause, play, and rewind
One of the most powerful tools in a successful career change is to "pause, play, and rewind", says Chilianis.
"Whether you are a convert to the benefits of mindfulness or not, I'm sure you will agree that focused attention is necessary for making significant life changes," she says.
When someone is making a big change, they increase their chances of success by understanding how the brain works, when it will interfere with performance, and "how to address and reduce these hindrances".
Taking the time to pause and self-reflect offers the opportunity to limit any "fight, flight or freeze response" and "boost your ability to think, plan and respond".
This reflection is also about understanding one's own priority values and how they influence "driving decisions" – which sometimes hold them back, Chilianis says.
Meanwhile making time to play is "crucial" to adaptability.
"As adults, we often forget how to play; however, play can be therapeutic as well as a great indicator of our strengths, which can show up from an early age," she says.
"Similar to mindfulness, play has been proven to have an incredible number of developmental benefits, such as a way to improve problem-solving, creativity, language, self-regulation and social skills."
And rewinding is a chance to "look at where you have come from and what you can learn from your experience so far... [It] will be really powerful and useful, showing what you want more of and less of in your next move".
In particular, Chilianis says reflecting on one's "job satisfaction history" highlights the ingredients they require in a fulfilling role.
"The idea of having 'meaning and purpose' at work might seem a little too aspirational for some, or perhaps intangible," she notes.
But humans create and seek meaning, so being able to articulate why people do what they do helps derive greater fulfilment from work.
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