By mid-career most executives can get another senior role. The harder question — and the one that decides whether year three is bearable — is which one is worth doing.
Whether your decisions change anything. Large organisations can offer enormous scope and very little consequence; smaller ones often the reverse.
You will spend more time with the executive team than with your own function. This is the most under-weighted factor in senior job choice, by a distance.
Most executives have one or two things they are unusually good at. A role that does not need them pays well and hollows out.
Sector alone. Plenty of people move into purpose-driven sectors and find the same frustrations with different vocabulary, because the frustrations were structural rather than thematic. Meaning is more reliably found in how a company makes decisions than in what it makes.
Ask what the last three difficult decisions were and how they were made. The answer tells you more about your next three years than the mission statement will.
No role supplies meaning permanently, and expecting one to is how good executives end up changing jobs every eighteen months. The realistic aim is a role where the work is consequential, the people are worth the hours, and the part of you that is genuinely good gets used most weeks.
Changing sector, function or company type after twenty years is possible, and the constraint is rarely capability. It is which part of your record transfers as evidence.
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 → Stepping up a levelMost 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 →A short call, your target list, and an honest answer about whether this fits how you are running your search.