EngineerHer

I have a BA. It was entirely accidental.

A few years after I graduated with my engineering degree, a manager I respected suggested I do a project management course through the Open University. He had a little budget left, he could see I was someone who wanted to grow, and he was willing to spend the time it took to first convince me to start — and then to support me once I did. He was, looking back, a textbook sponsor. He put his credibility behind my development and actively created the conditions for it to happen.

What he had actually done — though neither of us knew it at the time — was set me on a path that would eventually produce both an MSc in Technology Management and, entirely by accident, a BA.

The MSc took eight years. It spanned multiple roles, multiple managers, multiple countries. Some managers were supportive. Others weren’t. And it was during one of the unsupportive periods — when I found myself in a role I had been doing for about four years, coasting rather than growing, with a manager who had no interest in supporting my education and circumstances that meant I couldn’t fund it alone — that the accidental BA began.

I was in limbo. I knew how to do the job. I wasn’t being pushed. I wasn’t really pushing myself either. Something better would come along eventually, I told myself — but I wasn’t doing much to make that happen. I was just… waiting. And waiting, it turns out, is one of the most corrosive things you can do to yourself professionally.

So I did what I knew how to do. I opened the Open University catalogue and I looked for something interesting. Not something strategic. Not something that would look good on my CV. Something that genuinely interested me.

I chose creative writing.

Anyone who has ever had to write an engineering report on a difficult technical topic for a non-technical audience will understand immediately why this turned out to be one of the most professionally useful things I ever did. But at the time, I wasn’t thinking about professional utility at all. I was thinking about the fact that I loved it. So I took another module. And another. And eventually, because of the way the Open University credit system works, I had accumulated enough modules that they quietly added up to a BA — which arrived in the post one day as something of a surprise.

The limbo period had produced something I hadn’t been looking for. And the lesson I took from it has shaped how I think about career stagnation ever since.

The limbo problem — and why waiting makes it worse

There is a particular kind of career stuck that doesn’t look like stuck from the outside. You are employed. You are performing adequately. Nothing is visibly wrong. But inside, you know that you have outgrown what you are doing — and you can’t leave yet. The finances aren’t right. The timing isn’t right. The market isn’t right. Or you simply haven’t found what comes next.

The instinct in this situation is often to wait. To keep your head down, do the job, and preserve your energy until something better arrives. It feels sensible. It feels like patience.

But waiting is not neutral. It has a cost.

When you stop growing — when you stop being challenged, stop learning, stop being asked to stretch — something dims. Not quickly, and not dramatically, but consistently. Your confidence in your own ability to handle new things quietly erodes because you are no longer handling new things. Your sense of professional identity narrows because you are defined only by what you already know how to do. And the longer the limbo period goes on, the harder it becomes to imagine what comes next — because you have been standing still for so long that movement itself starts to feel unfamiliar.

The answer is not to force a premature exit. Sometimes you genuinely cannot leave yet, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help. But the answer is also not to wait passively. It is to use the limbo period deliberately — to do the internal work and the exploratory work that a demanding role rarely leaves space for.

What you can do when you can’t leave

The most important reframe is this: a period of professional limbo is not wasted time. It is available time. And available time, used well, is genuinely rare in an engineering career.

Reach outside your field. This is the lesson I took most clearly from the accidental BA. The creative writing modules didn’t just give me a qualification — they changed how I think. They gave me tools for communicating complexity, for structuring an argument, for understanding how a reader experiences information rather than how a writer intends it. These are engineering skills. They just don’t look like engineering skills from the inside of an engineering curriculum.

Whatever pulls at your curiosity — philosophy, design, psychology, history, music theory, economics — follow it without requiring it to be immediately useful. The usefulness tends to arrive later, in forms you couldn’t have predicted. The mind that has been genuinely interested in something new thinks differently than the mind that has been processing the same problems in the same ways for years.

Invest in skills that travel. When you are stuck in a role you have outgrown, one of the most productive things you can do is build capability that belongs to you regardless of where you go next. Communication, leadership, negotiation, strategic thinking, data analysis — these are not role-specific. They travel with you. They make the next thing easier to step into, whatever that next thing turns out to be.

Get clarity on what you actually want. Demanding roles rarely allow time for this. When you are flat out, you are too busy surviving to think clearly about direction. A limbo period, frustrating as it is, creates the space to ask questions you have been deferring: What kind of work do I actually want to do? What does a career that fits my life look like? What am I genuinely good at, and what do I want to stop pretending to care about? These are not quick questions. They take time and honesty to answer well. Use the limbo period to answer them.

Build relationships outside your current context. When you are stuck inside one organisation or one role, your network can start to feel as stuck as you are. Use this period to reconnect with people from earlier parts of your career, to attend events in adjacent fields, to have conversations with people who are doing things that interest you. Not with an agenda — just with genuine curiosity. The opportunities that change careers almost always come through relationships, and relationships need tending.

Protect your energy deliberately. A role you have outgrown can be quietly draining in a specific way — not because it is demanding, but because it is unstimulating. Boredom is exhausting in its own right. Be intentional about what you do with your energy outside of work. The creative writing course gave me something to look forward to, something that engaged a different part of my brain, something that was entirely mine. That matters more than it sounds when the working day itself is providing very little of that.

The arts in engineering — a word on what most people miss

I want to say something that I suspect will resonate with more engineers than are willing to admit it publicly: the arts are not irrelevant to technical work. They are profoundly relevant. And the engineering world’s tendency to treat them as a frivolous counterpoint to serious technical thinking is one of its more limiting assumptions.

Writing clearly about complex things is an art. Communicating a technical decision to a non-technical stakeholder without losing either accuracy or clarity is an art. Understanding how people experience systems — not just how systems function — is an art. Designing something that works and that someone will actually want to use is an art.

The creative writing modules I took during my limbo period made me a better engineering communicator. They made me a better thinker about how information lands, rather than just how it is transmitted. They gave me tools I still use. And I found them by following curiosity rather than strategy, during a period when I had the time to do so because my job wasn’t consuming all of it.

The limbo period, in retrospect, was a gift. Not one I would have chosen at the time — but a gift nonetheless.

A note on timing

None of what I’ve described above is about staying indefinitely. The point of using a limbo period well is not to make yourself comfortable in a role you’ve outgrown — it’s to arrive at what comes next better equipped, more certain of what you want, and having used the time rather than lost it.

The clarity that comes from giving yourself permission to learn something purely because it interests you, or from finally having the space to think about what you actually want, often turns out to be what makes the next move possible. Not just in terms of capability — but in terms of knowing clearly enough what you want to be able to go and get it.

My BA arrived in the post as a surprise. But what it represented wasn’t accidental at all. It represented a period of limbo that I had chosen — imperfectly, not always consciously, but genuinely — to use.

If you are in a role you’ve outgrown and you’re not sure what to do next, the Leadership Load Diagnostic is a useful starting point. It takes five minutes and will show you exactly where the weight is sitting in your career right now — and where the space might be.

➡️ Take the Leadership Load Diagnostic here

And if this resonated — if you are currently in a limbo period and wondering what to do with it — I’d genuinely love to hear from you. The accidental BA is one of my favourite things that ever happened to my career. I hope you find yours.