Change Your Number and Career

Changing cell phone numbers.

This is one of the inconveniences of the modern age. It's a struggle - the longer you have the number, the more people have it and the more difficult it becomes. You weigh the decision out in your mind more and more - is changing the service worth it, is getting a new phone worth it? Yes, I'd like to not have to type three times to get one letter, but does the hassle of changing over compensate for it (I've had the same number since 2004)?

You crawl through your address list, finding the people you need to contact with your new number. References on the web such as resumes? Those will have to be updated too. Don't forget your voice mail directing everyone to the new number as well.

Finally though, after all the contacting and uploading and downloading, you still have two phones and two numbers in your possession. At some point, you simply have to shut the first one down.

And then I suddenly realized it is the same in real life with a career.

The longer you have a career, the more experience you have in it and the more inertia you have in not making a change. You weigh the decision in your mind - is getting a new career worth it, or can you make do a few more years on the old (the answer here, I think will always eventually be no. Careers you don't like are the same as old cars: at some time, they will simply give out).

Updating is even more difficult than the phone: you have to retool your resume, inventory your skills and resubmit them, change your references on the web, redirect the very substance of your life into a new channel.

And yet, after all that retooling and searching and gearing up, you still have the current career and potential career in hand. Hopefully you've done your homework and are ready. But you still have the two careers.

But like the phone, at some point you just have to shut one down.

The phone I think I can handle. Can I do the same with my career?