"Embrace the chaos and treat it as an adventure"

Kurt Budge was the CEO of a listed mining company for almost nine years when he quit in 2023 with not much of a plan for his next step. His board had started to get a bit concerned when Kurt (MBA2004) would talk about spiritual enlightenment and Forrest yoga in meetings in the months before he made his exit. Had he lost the plot? Kurt smiles reflecting. In fact, he was in the middle of finding something; he just wasn’t sure what. “It’s not straightforward to leave a public company CEO role. When I had the opportunity, I saw it as an escape, but to what? I didn’t know. So, I followed a growing curiosity and that was to qualify as a Forrest yoga teacher. That was my first step.”

Russell Jones arrived at London Business School four years ago to complete an MBA. The army officer whose specialist area had been counter terrorism was keen to pivot into a career in luxury goods consulting for one of the major strategy houses. But in a twist of fate, at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley where Russell was accepted to take part in an international business school exchange programme, Russell discovered a new interest in conceptual art.

“It began with me wanting to understand how the market appraises value, particularly concerning unique and high-value products and assets so I spent a lot of my spare time visiting the art school classes,” he says.

One of the classes explored strategies for researching, formulating, and implementing a large-scale social practice experiential art project outside of a traditional art gallery. “Within the curriculum of the MBA, I’d learned about how large-scale movements adjacent to business had grown from grassroots ideas to cultural leaders and this had really interested me.”

By the time Russell came back to London, he was already trying to work out how he could make a career as a conceptual artist and eventually just decided to zealously gallop toward his new career goal.

These are two examples of extreme mid-career pivots, showing that it is never too late to pursue passion, purpose and pastures new, but as Hermina Ibarra, Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, has extensively written about, career transitions, particularly after a lengthy and successful work life, are laden with metaphorical land mines. Navigating these without them blowing away your confidence and ability to move forward can be extremely difficult.

Overcoming the barriers to change

Speaking at the recent think ahead event From Traditional to Trailblazing: Strategies for Mid-Career Transition, Herminia says that deep research into the subject reveals the key barriers to mid-career transition – and top of the pile is not knowing how to get started, especially for those who don’t actually know what they’re shooting for. “You’ve been taught not to take action until you know what you want,” Herminia says. “So, then people feel, well, maybe I shouldn’t do anything; I don’t want to make a dumb move.”

If you have been on a linear career track for 10, 20 or 30 years, your identity is likely to be bound up with your career and your industry network. Part of the challenge of career transition is leaving behind this network, where there is recognition of your status, knowledge and skills developed over your adult life. According to Herminia, this feeling of belonging and an entrenched sense of self can actually be the main barrier to moving forward and imagining a new professional path, and Kurt agrees.

He applied to the London Business School MBA programme in 2002 as preparation to leave the mining industry. Instead, after graduation, he joined Rio Tinto, one of the biggest mining companies in the world, the path of least resistance. “Your old networks only reinforce who you used to be,” says Russell, who advises career changers to forge new relationships with people in the field you want to move into so you can begin to build a new identity for yourself.

For those who know what they don’t want, but are not yet committed to a new path, Herminia talks about the dangers of the “messy middle” of a career transition – the part where you are “betwixt and between”. You’ve left the safety net of your career and your old self behind, but you haven’t quite figured out your new identity. This is the panic point. How do you handle it?

Kurt says just being aware of these milestone stages of the journey was helpful for him to be able to navigate this “messy middle”. As well as becoming a yoga instructor, Kurt enrolled in Herminia’s new online Executive Education course, Career Change: Mid-Career and Beyond, which he says armed him with the psychological tools to deal with the change.

“In the course, we are told to imagine the possible selves that we could be and then identify what the gaps are between where we are now and that future self,” says Kurt. “I’ve always considered a career path to be linear and so these were all new concepts for me.” He adds that being around people taking a similar journey was also of huge benefit.

‘Experiment and learn’

Today, employee turnover in most companies is higher than ever as redundancies and restructuring have become a depressing, but accepted part of corporate life. Developments in AI will shake up existing workforce structures further. In addition, we are living longer and traditional concepts of retirement are becoming antiquated. The consequences will be more people wanting and needing to make mid-life career changes. So, how to get started?

Herminia talks about an approach called “Experiment and Learn” which involves taking small strategic steps in line with your interests. This could be as simple and inexpensive as buying a book or doing some volunteer work. “Do anything extracurricular that will help you to extract yourself from the context that so heavily defines you and will help you figure out whether this new self is for you,” Herminia says. “You may decide that actually, that isn’t the path for you and that’s fine – that’s progress, because you can move on to the next thing.”

Russell says he treated his career transition like an entrepreneur starting a business or an investment fund. “They are very similar,” he says. “You have to have the mindset that for the first year, you’re going to need finance and you probably won’t make any money for two years; your idea may or may not be validated and it could all go horribly wrong. You have to work out what value you’ll be contributing and whether it will put food on the table.

“If you can start it as a side hustle that is optimal as that takes the pressure off funds,” Russell adds but that obviously depends on time and opportunity.

For Russell, he acknowledges that he was fortunate to have found financial backers for his first art project quite quickly, which was very important for validation that a sustainable transition into this new world could be feasible.

One consensus at the April think ahead event, moderated by Sarah Gordon, Visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE and former CEO at the Impact Investing Institute,, who also embarked on a career pivot, leaving journalism after a 20-year career, is that the journey presents deep challenges, many of which you can’t plan for.

However, that should not hold you back. Herminia says the worst thing you can do, is to do nothing at all. 

“There’s a whole area of academic study of career inaction, which prolongs over time, produces self blame and erodes confidence and then prevents action.  Whatever you do, don’t stay inside your head, go out and do something, a small experiment. Have the confidence that one step will lead to another.”

Hear Russell Jones and Kurt Budge talk about the realities and challenges of their career transition and what they might have done differently in a panel discussion with top tips for a successful transition from Herminia Ibarra