The phrase sounds like a workshop. In practice it is a short sequence of decisions that most executives make under pressure, badly, and could have made calmly months earlier.
A transition plan is not a folder. It is four answers held clearly enough to act on the day something changes: what you want to be doing, at what altitude, in which kind of company, and what you will refuse. Everything else — the CV, the profile, the outreach — is downstream of those four, and gets rewritten every time one of them moves.
Most people write the CV first. That is why the CV takes six drafts: it is being asked to make a decision that belongs upstream of it.
Not your title — the work. Whether you are a marketer who has run commercial teams or a commercial leader who came up through marketing changes which briefs you fit.
The level you are credible at now, which is usually one step up from your last role, and occasionally the same step in a bigger room.
Company stage, sector, ownership. A first-time chief marketing officer in a founder-led business and one in a listed group are two different jobs.
What you will not take, written down. Without it, month five produces a compromise you would have rejected in month one.
Search is a long game, and long games are lost to drift. The purpose of writing down what you will not do is to hold the line at the point where you are tired and a mediocre offer is in front of you. The plan exists for that moment, not for the moment you write it.
A transition plan is mostly subtraction. Its usefulness is measured by what it lets you say no to in month five.
Before you need it. A plan made while you are still employed is made by somebody with leverage, time and a working network. The same four questions asked a week after an exit produce shakier answers, because urgency is a poor editor.
It will not tell you which company will hire you, and it does not shorten the search. What it does is stop you spending three months pursuing roles you would have turned down — the most common way a senior search wastes a year.
A working transition plan fits on one page: four decisions, a company list, a weekly rhythm and a set of refusals. Here is how to write one that survives month five.
Read → Transition and outplacementThe support on offer between senior roles is mostly emotional or administrative. The two things that decide the outcome are neither, and almost nobody supplies them.
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 →A short call, your target list, and an honest answer about whether this fits how you are running your search.