The higher you go, the more specific the hiring becomes — which makes a change of direction harder, but for a narrower reason than most people assume.
Not your ability to do the job. What blocks it is that boards hire against risk, and a candidate whose evidence comes from a different context requires the hirer to make an inference. At junior levels that inference is cheap. At chief level it is the whole decision, which is why the same CV that would walk into an adjacent role stalls in an unfamiliar one.
The most achievable. The craft transfers; what you must supply is evidence you understand the new sector's constraints, which is learnable in weeks and provable in conversation.
Harder. Your context is credible and your craft is not, so the route usually runs through a role that touches both before it becomes the new one.
Rare at senior level through a hiring process. It usually happens through somebody who knows you well enough to back the judgement rather than the record.
Boards hire against risk. A career change succeeds when your evidence makes the inference small enough for somebody to sign.
A change of direction at this level usually takes longer than staying in lane, and often costs something — a level, a title, a period of proving. That is worth knowing in advance, because the searches that fail badly are the ones where the cost was never accepted and every offer looked like a demotion.
Most senior careers are managed by accident — a recruiter calls at the right moment. Deliberate management is a small, repeatable habit with a large compounding effect.
Read → The reverse job searchThirty to sixty companies, chosen in three layers, filtered by the things that actually predict fit. The list is the foundation of a reverse search.
Read → Executive career coachingA board hires a story it can repeat. How to build one from twenty years of circumstance without inflating anything.
Read →A short call, your target list, and an honest answer about whether this fits how you are running your search.