– + Learn

Three Paths for a Career Pivot, with Charity McDonald

by

Share

Listen On:

Career changes are becoming a natural part of modern work life. But navigating them well can be challenging, especially in uncertain times. On this episode of Find Your Dream Job, career and leadership consultant Charity McDonald shares her framework for making a successful pivot through the three paths for a career pivot: possibilities, patience, and people.

Charity explains how to expand your options by focusing on your transferable skills, managing expectations when a job search takes longer than planned, and building genuine connections that lead to new opportunities. She also offers tips for reframing rejection, staying patient amid uncertainty, and using LinkedIn to reach hiring managers in a more personal way.

About Our Guest:

Resources in This Episode:

Transcript

Find Your Dream Job, Episode 527:

Three Paths for a Career Pivot, with Charity McDonald

Airdate: November 12, 2025

Mac Prichard:

This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life.

I’m your host, Mac Prichard. I’m also the founder of Mac’s List. It’s a job board in the Pacific Northwest that helps you find a fulfilling career.

Every Wednesday, I talk to a different expert about the tools you need to get the work you want.

It’s common now to change careers, and you’ll likely do so at least once and perhaps several times.

And to do it successfully, you need to know what works and what doesn’t work when you make the switch.

Charity McDonald is here to talk about the three paths for a career pivot.

She’s an author, speaker, and career and leadership consultant. Charity joins us from Somerset, New Jersey.

Well, let’s jump right into it, Charity.

When you talk about a career pivot, what do you mean exactly?

Charity McDonald:

Yes, career pivots are very, very common in most people’s careers. So if we’re talking about it being an internal process where someone’s deciding they want to level up in leadership in their career, or it’s an external issue, meaning that maybe they’ve been somehow displaced from their job due to a reduction in force.

Now they’re in a position where they have to move through a career transition, and that does require a pivot.

Mac Prichard:

So sometimes it’s a voluntary choice, and sometimes circumstances force you to make a career pivot. When people do choose to do it voluntarily, what’s driving that typically?

Charity McDonald:

Yes. So a lot of people do find that they are not necessarily for whatever reason, the position they may have outgrown the position, they may feel that they’re not being challenged enough.

Or they feel there aren’t opportunities to grow within the role that they have. Those tend to be the main reasons why people make that decision to move forward and make a career pivot.

Mac Prichard:

And you mentioned a moment ago, Charity, that career pivots have become common. Why is that? And how often should someone expect to make a career pivot?

Charity McDonald:

It would definitely be more common now than it was in the past. Like, obviously, there was more job retention and job security in times past. Now things have changed due to the changes with technology, globalization, and the need to upskill and gain new skills that have just recently been presented to the market.

Just basically to answer your question, the career pivot might be inevitable for those newer to their career or those who are, I would say, early to mid professionals. And even some senior-level professionals as well, if they’re deciding that they want to do a career pivot, what that would look like is very different now than it has been previously.

Mac Prichard:

Okay. So as the economy changes, technology changes, and careers are going to change. Is there a ballpark number you’ve seen about how often it typically might happen to you in your 40-plus years in the workplace that you will make a career pivot?

Charity McDonald:

I feel as though, really, depending on the individual, right? So, depending on when they entered the career workforce, when they actually started working. So for myself, I’m an older millennial.

Before that reason, there’s been a lot of pivoting that took place, right? Where with someone that’s maybe a boomer, it might be a different experience, where they’ve been able to have more job security and be within the same role for a long time.

Actually, a lot of people I support in career transition they are people who have held the same job for 20 years, sometimes even 30 years, and they’re in the first time doing a transition, and it’s very overwhelming to them.

Those who are a little earlier in their career, it could be new to them, but they’re almost knowing that they’re going to have to experience a career pivot. They know it will happen. So it’s coming at some point, likely.

Mac Prichard:

When you do make the switch and you make that career pivot, what are common challenges you see the people you work with face?

Charity McDonald:

In general, the expectation of the time that it will take to land the following position. They tend to assume that I guess the time that it took previously, that’s the same amount of time it should take or that it will take really quickly, depending on the pivot that they’re making, depending on the industry.

So I tend to work with more people in the tech space. Talent and HR as well. But I noticed the tech professionals, they do assume it’ll be a much faster turnaround. And as we see in the current market, it will take much longer in order to sustain their next role.

Mac Prichard:

So I know there are people who are listening and watching her, and they want to know a time range, Charity. Are we talking about three months, six months, or a year? If you want to pivot careers, what do you see in the clients you work with?

Charity McDonald:

Yes, that’s a great question. It really will vary according to industry once again and the experience that the professional has in making that pivot. But I will say that the general numbers show that from the end of the person that’s recruiting from the time they actually post a requisition, a job posting, on average, it would be about 44 days for them to fill the role.

But for a job seeker, the time frame usually would have been on average 5 to 6 months on average for a job seeker.

At this point, that time has expanded. So it could be up to a year actually, in order to make a transition in this current market, because we’re currently in an employer’s market as opposed to a candidate’s market, it would be a quicker process to be rehired.

Mac Prichard:

What mistakes do you see people make when switching careers that they can avoid?

Charity McDonald:

Yeah, sometimes I think that again, the expectation piece. It can really get them in their own way. So they’ll be very disappointed with the lack of progress.

Not understanding that that progress that they’re making, they may not feel that it’s positive, but they’re actually they actually are making impact in their career transition and they’re learning what works and what doesn’t.

The other element might be branding. So a lot of times people do not know how to optimize their resumes and their LinkedIn’s and more practical sense.

So that’s just making it where it’s more visible to the people that they want to work with and they may get hung up on a specific position where in other markets or other companies, it could literally be the same position, but just have a different job title.

Mac Prichard:

Okay. So we’ve talked about how often career pivots are likely to happen and why, and, and mistakes to avoid. I do want to talk about the benefits of career pivots. What positive changes do you see when people make these switches, Charity, before we talk through how to do it?

What are the benefits?

Charity McDonald:

There are a lot of great benefits. Just being able to know that the transferable skills that a professional has are applicable to other fields or other opportunities they may not have been aware of. They’re able to maybe utilize their zone of genius.

There are some people who function mainly as implementers, where maybe their zone of genius is strategic management, or maybe doing some things that are more visionary instead of just being a doer of doing tasks.

Mac Prichard:

Terrific. Well, let’s talk about your three paths to a career pivot and the first path you say is possibilities. What do you mean by this?

Charity McDonald:

Possibilities going back to the earlier point I made about just being more open-minded, managing your expectations in terms of what is a possibility for you. A lot of professionals tend to be really gung-ho on like one specific job title, where what I would recommend is to actually be open to maybe three job titles that are within the same job function.

And then with that, it actually expands the options that they have because in certain industries, a job can have a slightly different title or a different title completely, but it’s a very similar function to what they were doing previously.

When you have possibilities, you’re just making room for more options to come your way when you’re kind of limiting or contracting the options. It makes it more difficult.

Mac Prichard:

There are an overwhelming number of job titles on the internet, when you look at a job board like Indeed or Mac’s List, how do you recommend focusing in and finding out what those three job titles might be that you do concentrate on?

Charity McDonald:

Yes, when I’m working with someone in transition, I try to actually lean into what are their strengths. So what are their natural strengths? What are the things that they are told they’re good at doing? What are things that they would like to do more of? We’re able to kind of get like an assessment of your skills essentially and look at your skill stack.

And from there, you can kind of determine, look at that as well as what are the in-demand skills in your field or the fields you want to go into. So this will vary again from person to person, but taking inventory of what you’re good at, what is in demand in the market right now in terms of skills.

Mac Prichard:

Okay. Focus on those three job titles and consider those possibilities. Let’s take a break and when we come back, I want to talk about the other two paths to a career pivot.

Stay with us. When we return, Charity McDonald will continue to share her advice on the three paths to a career pivot.

We’re back in the Mac’s List Studio. I’m talking with Charity McDonald.

She’s an author, speaker, and a leadership and career consultant. And Charity joins us from Somerset, New Jersey. Now,

Charity, before the break, we were talking about three paths for a career pivot, and you walked us through the first one, which is possibilities. I want to have you take us through the other two paths for a career pivot. And the second one is patience. Why does patience matter when you make a career pivot, Charity?

Charity McDonald:

Yeah, patience is extremely important. It’s about managing your expectations, but also not getting in your own way and being impatient to where you’re kind of just giving up before you’ve even started to make real progress in your career pivot.

So patience is really important in terms of just your mindset and managing your expectations in your career pivot journey.

Mac Prichard:

We talked about timelines for career pivots in the first segment. What, why do people become impatient? Is it the amount of time involved, or are there other reasons?

Charity McDonald:

Well, there are some obvious factors around the impatience for sure. If someone is, let’s say, making a career pivot because it’s an external reason, like a reduction in force where they were unexpectedly removed from their positions, or they just made the choice to leave their positions without there being something else in place.

It does definitely carry over into they’re going to be wanting to move a lot quicker with the whole process of career pivot. They wanna move fast because now they’re in a situation where they need to obviously replace their income. It helps with their livelihood as well.

And other factors to impatience, could just be that their experience was that they were able to receive a position a lot faster.

And in this current market, they’re experiencing that it’s much lower than it has ever been because it is an employer’s market. So they’re taking a lot longer. There might be more rounds of interviews than they’ve anticipated. Usually there were like maybe three, maybe three or four, but some people experience having six, seven, or even eight interviews sometimes.

So because of that, that’s extending the timeframe. And because there are more people in the job market actively looking, regardless of if they’re employed or not, that does change things dramatically.

Mac Prichard:

What are your best tips for how to remain patient as timelines lengthen and employers put people through multiple interviews? What’s worked for your clients?

Charity McDonald:

Yes, I think that this is really, you know, it will depend, but I always remind the people I’m supporting, the candidates I support, or clients, is that the timing of when the right opportunity will present itself –– it’s really not something that we can control from our end.

It’s just more of making sure we’re making the right connections and that will bring us closer. And hopefully it will collapse the time when we’re reaching out to more connections, which gets into the next point.

But just in general, just to stay, remain patient is just managing your expectations. So when I tell people some of the stats that I shared earlier about the timeframe it takes for a rack to be filled,

versus the time it takes for someone who’s in a career pivot to actually reach their goal.

They are really like, wow, they didn’t realize it took that long, right? Because in most people’s experience, it was a lot shorter. It might be three months or less for most people in their earlier experiences. But now that time has shifted to the six to 12 month mark for most people now.

Mac Prichard:

You talked about recognizing that so much is out of our control when we’re pivoting careers.

And you touched on this obviously in the first segment about steps you can take that you are in control of, but what, say more about what you can control when you’re making a career pivot to help you, to remain patient.

Charity McDonald:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s all imperative that we take inventory, not just of, you know, our strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities and things of that nature, but also take inventory of what we do have control over.

So back to the patience part, it is important that we understand, okay, there is a right opportunity and when someone is receiving rejections, you know, because a lot of people are very, you know, disheartened when they get a rejection notice or email.

I actually tell them to reframe no as the next opportunity or the next option, and that the right opportunity is bound to present itself if they are doing all of the things that they should do in their career pivot as far as their branding, as far as their networking and building relationships.

And as far as them really getting in contact with decision makers. Eventually, there will be a person who can help them along the path that they’re aiming to reach.

Mac Prichard:

So we talked about the first path: possibilities. The second path to a career pivot is patience. The third one is people. Why are people so important, such an important path to making a career pivot?

Charity McDonald:

So people are at the core of the decisions at this point in time. To my knowledge, most jobs, they are being filled by people. So what it is important to remember is a lot of times people, get very frustrated professionals who are applying to hundreds of jobs, even in being frustrated that they’re only getting one or two interviews, and it’s not really going anywhere.

But that same energy could have been used to connect with hundreds of people. Right? Over time, it’s not something you’re doing overwhelmingly in a day, but over time you’re able to actually leverage the connections that you make with people who can make decisions or introduce you to those who can.

So most people who are getting hired, it is through either referrals, recruiters who have either reached out to them, or they reached out vice versa, or someone, you know, took the initiative to reach out. So the job seeker is reaching out to the person who’s the decision maker. And I would say.

Yeah, definitely 80 % of the people I’ve supported, and I’ve supported hundreds of people, they are filling the roles through the relationships that they built with people. So whether that’s internally or externally

Mac Prichard:

Why do referrals matter so much to recruiters?

Charity McDonald:

They definitely matter. So in my state as a recruiter, there’s definitely a difference between when someone who was a hiring manager, hiring professional is aware that a person is referred in internally.

There is a difference with how that person will be regarded in terms of they might very well be depending on who the referrals coming from. They could very well be shortlisted to ensure that at least their resume is definitely being seen and carefully reviewed.

And then I would say at best they are going to be offered usually more money when it comes to negotiations as opposed to someone who just applied online.

Mac Prichard:

Some listeners may think, “I don’t know how to generate referrals. I don’t have a network.” What would you say to an audience member who’s thinking that right now?

Charity McDonald:

Yes, it is definitely one of the bigger challenges for most people, very high-achieving professionals that find themselves the first time in a career pivot is the networking piece because they may feel that that’s putting them at a, even if they have a network, they may be reluctant to reach out to people that they know because they may see that as a loss of power.

And then for those who don’t have a network established, they may find that extremely overwhelming because they don’t know the first part of getting started.

So really getting started is just as simple as sending a message where you’re adding value to someone that can potentially be a decision maker. And LinkedIn actually makes it a little simpler for people to get started with that process.

Mac Prichard:

How do you coach people to use LinkedIn to make those connections that are going to result in those referrals that are going to get the attention of recruiters? What have you seen work?

Charity McDonald:

Yes, definitely going to the profiles and actually reviewing the profiles. So instead of just submitting your application when there is when it is open, so some of the recruiters and hiring professionals, they actually make their profile open on a job description.

That’s the great thing about LinkedIn in some cases. So you’re able to actually go to the job itself – the description and click on the picture of the person who made that post. You’re able to send them a message, but I would say other than just sending them a message like everyone else might do, you want to also connect with them and make a personal connection with them.

So you want to make sure you review their profile and find commonalities that you have with them. And I found that that has helped. A VP of professional services, he said that he saw the volunteer work, I believe, that someone who was a hiring professional, basically, see a C-suite professional. They were able to connect from that because they had commonalities with their volunteer work and in their interests outside of work.

So that led to him being able to interview and he was shortlisted for an opportunity. The other thing is that a lot of people just kind of don’t know who they don’t know the folks. So they’re maybe questioning, “Well, I don’t know this person, so I don’t want to reach out to them.” But you just want to come from a place of adding value.

Mac Prichard:

Say more about that quickly when you say a position of adding value. What have you seen work when people do that?

Charity McDonald:

Yes, adding value. Like, let’s say maybe they’re not commonalities or it’s not that easy to find. Adding value would be the best way to get started with someone you do not know. So that could be sharing an article that’s relevant to that person’s interest or sharing, you know, a book that you’re reading to help you grow in your professional development.

You can also just kind of ask them, what are different things that they’re doing in their professional development, and just share with them, “Hey, you know, I’m looking to develop in my profession. Are there some recommendations you may have?” But you want to come from the place of offering value first.

Mac Prichard:

Terrific. Well, it’s been a great conversation, Charity. Now tell us what’s next for you.

Charity McDonald:

What’s next for me is I have an impending book that I’ve co-authored with some great ladies in North America. And it is called Women, Work & Leadership: Embracing Courage and Boldly Leading From Within, right?

So it’s about the self-leadership as well as team leadership as well, and also leading from different aspects personally and professionally. I’m really excited about the book and I feel it will be of great value to anyone who’s listening who wants to grow just in knowing what is the next step for them.

What I love is each chapter will give practical advice at the end of so you can get started right away. So it’s inspirational, transformational, but also has practical advice.

Mac Prichard:

Well, congratulations. That’s a big accomplishment. And I know it will help many readers. I know also that our audience can learn more about you, Charity, by connecting with you on LinkedIn.

And when you do reach out to Charity on LinkedIn, please mention you saw her heard her on Find Your Dream Job.

Charity, given all the great advice you’ve shared today, what’s the one thing you want our audience to remember about the three paths for a career pivot?

Charity McDonald:

I would say probably the most imperative thing is that people are the ones making the decisions. So if you’re not connecting with people, whether they’re people you know or people you do not know, that is what’s going to bring you closer to the outcome that you want.

And having that patience as well will help you, over time, maybe with a connection you met some months ago, they can circle back around to say, hey, you I remember you were interested in opportunities in this particular industry. Perhaps I can do an introduction or perhaps you can interview with my colleague. That happens as well.

Mac Prichard:

Next week, our guest will be Samorn Selim.

She’s the founder of Career Unicorns®.

Her company has helped more than 1,000 women, BIPOC, and first-generation professionals land dream jobs, negotiate raises, and create thriving careers.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed when you look for work. There are so many things you could do.

But there are only so many hours in the day. How do you avoid exhausting yourself?

Join us next Wednesday when Samorn Selim and I talk about how to get your next job without burning out.

Until next time, thanks for letting us help you find your dream job.

This show is produced by Mac’s List.

Until next time, thanks for letting us help you find your dream job.

This show is produced by Mac’s List.

Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media and creates our transcripts.

Our sound engineer and editor is Matt Fiorillo. And our music is by Freddy Trujillo.

This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.

###