Why Your Climate Career Pivot Is Taking So Long (and How to Fix It)
A career change in mid-career is rarely blocked by lack of skill or motivation. More often, it stalls because capable professionals take sensible actions in an unhelpful order. Research replaces decisions. Applications come before clarity. And hours are spent re-writing your CV/Resume.
Effort increases while progress towards a career you want stays stubbornly flat. The result is a career change that takes far longer than expected — not because something is “wrong”, but because the sequence is.
I get asked this…. a lot.
This is especially common for people exploring a career change into climate, sustainability, and purpose driven careers where the work feels meaningful but the path is unclear. Many experienced professionals find themselves stuck between knowing their current role no longer fits and being unable to move decisively toward what comes next. This article explains why career changes so often drag on at this stage — and what actually shortens the timeline.
Effort Alone Doesn’t Speed Up a Career Change
There’s a very specific frustration that shows up for experienced professionals trying to move into climate or sustainability work.
You care. You’ve got skills. You’ve probably done a fair bit of reading, listened to the ‘right’ podcasts, and found the thought leaders on LinkedIn. You may even have a thoughtfully organised folder or document titled something like “Career ideas – FINAL v3”, or a neat new note book full of mind maps and ideas, in differently coloured pens. (I did the same, no shame).
And yet… the process feels slow. Heavier than it should. Slightly draining in a way that’s hard to explain to people who aren’t in it.
When that happens, it’s very easy to turn the blame inward. To assume the problem must be confidence, or clarity, or some missing personal-brand ingredient that everyone else seems to have figured out.
In reality, that’s rarely the issue.
Most career pivots don’t stall because people aren’t trying hard enough. They stall because people are doing sensible things in an unhelpful order. The effort isn’t wrong, it’s just mistimed. And that matters more than most people realise.
This is a post about sequence. Not hacks. Not motivation. And definitely not “10 climate jobs you could apply for this week”.
The cost of a career pivot that drags on
A slow pivot doesn’t usually feel dramatic. It doesn’t arrive with a single crash or rejection. It erodes things gently, over time.
First, time slips away. Then energy goes — not all at once, but in small withdrawals that make everything feel slightly harder than it used to. The weeks go by, and the lack of progress erodes the motivation to continue.
Eventually confidence takes a knock, not because you’ve suddenly become less capable, but because sustained effort without visible response has a way of messing with anyone’s head.
The really dangerous part comes after that.
People don’t tend to give up in a blaze of self-awareness and conscious change of plans. They just… adjust their expectations. They become more, um “realistic”. They decide that meaningful work is probably for other people, or another life stage, or a parallel universe where mortgages and children don’t exist.
The voices of the colleagues, friends and peers who have doubted this from the start (because they don’t want to see you go) become louder, and more persuasive. “You can’t have it all, money doesn’t grow on tree y’know”
That’s how pivots quietly fail. Not through rejection, but through slow self-editing.
The frustrating thing is that much of this is avoidable.
Effort isn’t the issue. Direction usually is.
When progress stalls, most people respond in the same way: they try harder.
More research. More applications. More networking. More tweaking. All perfectly reasonable moves, especially if you’ve spent 10 or 20 years being rewarded for diligence.
The problem is that effort doesn’t automatically create progress. It amplifies direction. If the direction is clear, effort helps. If the direction is fuzzy, effort just speeds up the wrong process.
This is why “just push through” often backfires. You don’t suddenly arrive at clarity through exhaustion. You just arrive tired.
What’s needed isn’t more intensity. It’s better sequencing.
Three reasons pivots take longer than they need to
1. The exploration trap (a.k.a. the illusion of productive circling)
Exploration feels responsible. It looks like progress. It even comes with that small dopamine hit of “I’m doing something”.
Articles saved. Podcasts queued. Conversations booked. Notes taken.
The problem is that without a decision framework, exploration tends to widen the field rather than narrow it. The more you learn, the more complex the landscape becomes, and the harder it feels to choose anything with confidence.
Many people assume clarity will arrive after enough exploration. That if they just look a bit harder, the right answer will reveal itself.
In practice, clarity tends to arrive when you decide what you’re optimising for.
This is where the word decide earns its keep. To decide isn’t to keep all doors open; it’s to close some deliberately. Not forever, but for now. It’s about defining criteria — the conditions that tell you whether something is a good use of your time and energy.
Once you have criteria, something slightly surprising happens. The world doesn’t shrink. It sharpens. You stop asking “Could I do this?” and start asking “Does this meet the bar I’ve set for myself?”
Without that, you’re not exploring — you’re pacing the hallway with every door ajar. (And I am more than happy to accept better metaphors for this).
2. Not all “stuck” is the same (and treating it as such is expensive)
From the outside, a lot of stuck career pivots look similar. Someone is applying. Someone is networking. Someone is putting the hours in.
Under the surface, there are usually two very different situations hiding under the same label.
Stick with me here, this is a little nuanced. (And yes, I do know what patronising means).
The first is being stuck before momentum. This feels like silence. Applications disappear into the void. Outreach gets polite replies or none at all. Nothing is obviously wrong, but nothing is really happening either. In this state, the issue is rarely effort. It’s that the market can’t quite tell what you do, who you help, or why you’re relevant. You’re competent, but indistinct.
The second is being stuck after momentum. Conversations are happening. Interviews may be happening. You’re close — just not quite landing it. This isn’t the moment to start again from scratch. It’s usually a moment for refinement: sharper positioning, clearer outcomes, more precise language about the value you bring.
Both states feel frustrating. Only one of them is solved by doing more of the same.
If you misdiagnose where you’re stuck, you end up optimising blindly. You pull the same lever harder because effort is visible to you — even when it’s invisible to everyone else.
3. The awkward truth: the market can’t see your effort
This is the bit that’s easy to understand intellectually and oddly hard to accept emotionally.
The market cannot respond to private effort.
Reading, researching, taking courses, refining your thinking, improving your understanding — all useful, all legitimate. But from the outside, most of it simply doesn’t exist.
Markets respond to signal. To clarity. To evidence of value that someone else can recognise and repeat.
When signal is present, things speed up. People know how to describe you. Introductions happen more easily. Conversations feel less forced. Opportunities stop requiring quite so much chasing.
The tricky part is that signal is hard to judge from the inside. What feels obvious to you may be invisible to others. What feels risky to you is often what makes you clear.
A helpful way to think about your route to stronger signalling is as a ladder of commitment. At the lower rungs, you might simply articulate what you’re learning and why it matters, using language your future colleagues would recognise. As confidence grows, you build proof projects — small, concrete demonstrations of the kind of value you want to create.
If you are stuck at this stage, find out how to signal your value to shift your career
They don’t need to be grand. They need to be specific, relevant, and visible.
The goal isn’t to announce expertise. It’s to make your usefulness legible.
The sequence that shortens the timeline
When you step back, the pattern is fairly consistent.
First, define your criteria. Not poetically — practically. What actually matters now, and what doesn’t.
Second, diagnose the problem you’re really facing. Are you stuck before momentum, or after it?
Third, focus on signal that other people can see, rather than effort that only you can feel.
This doesn’t make a pivot effortless. It does make it less draining. The work starts to compound instead of evaporate.
A final, honest question
If nothing changed over the next six months — if the process continued at the same pace, with the same level of response — how would that feel?
Not as a scare tactic. Just as a check.
Because waiting isn’t neutral. And in my experience, most long pivots aren’t caused by a lack of ability or commitment. They’re caused by people doing sensible things in an unhelpful order for far too long.
Fix the order, and the whole experience shifts. It stops feeling like trudging through fog and starts to feel like a structured experiment, one that produces feedback, learning, and movement.
And for experienced people, feedback is what makes speed possible.
Accelerate Your Career Change - With Confidence
If you are stuck, and your confidence is seeping away, let’s talk about how a structured and supported approach can accelerate your career change and shorten the time between now and you making the contribution in the world that you want. I take on a small number of 1:1 clients every month, lets see if we are a good fit….
