EngineerHer

A while ago a friend of mine did something that most of us would love to do and very few of us ever actually do.

She stopped.

Between one job ending and the next one beginning, she gave herself the summer. Not to job hunt. Not to network. Not to update her LinkedIn profile or refresh her CV or reach out to recruiters. Just to stop, and think, and figure out what she actually wanted before she went looking for it.

She was the first to acknowledge that not everyone can do this. Time between jobs is a privilege – financially, practically, in every way. But she had something else going on too. A family member who is seriously ill. A life that was reminding her, loudly, that time is not a renewable resource and that spending it in the wrong place has a real cost.

So she stopped. And she started asking the questions that most of us never ask – not because we don’t want the answers, but because we don’t give ourselves the space to find them.

I’ve been thinking about her a lot recently. Not because of the stopping – although there’s a lot to be said for that – but because of why she felt she needed to.

She left a job that wasn’t working. And before she took another one, she wanted to understand why it wasn’t working. Really understand it. Not just “the culture wasn’t right” or “my manager and I didn’t see eye to eye.” The real why. The specific, honest, uncomfortable why.

Because she’s done this before. Most of us have. We leave a role that isn’t working, we find a new one that looks better on paper, and somewhere around month six we start to notice something familiar. A feeling we recognise. A dynamic we’ve been in before. A version of the same frustration in a different building.

And we wonder how we got here again.

The story we tell ourselves when we leave

When a job isn’t working, we reach for explanations. And the explanations we reach for are almost always true – just not complete.

The culture wasn’t right. The manager was difficult. The role wasn’t what was advertised. The organisation didn’t value what I brought. There was no room to grow.

All of these things can be real. All of them can be genuinely, legitimately the reason a role didn’t work. I’m not suggesting we gaslight ourselves into thinking the problem was us when it wasn’t.

But here’s the thing about those explanations. They’re descriptions, not diagnoses. They tell you what the symptoms were. They don’t tell you why that particular environment produced those symptoms for you specifically – or what that means for the next role you choose.

“The culture wasn’t right” tells you nothing about what culture you actually need. “My manager was difficult” tells you nothing about what kind of management you genuinely thrive under. “There was no room to grow” tells you nothing about which direction you actually want to grow in.

And without those answers – the specific, personal, honest answers – you’re not choosing your next role. You’re just escaping your last one.

The gap nobody talks about

There’s a gap between “I need to leave” and “I know where I’m going.” And most career advice – most job hunting advice, most CV advice, most interview coaching – lives entirely on the “where I’m going” side of that gap.

Update your CV. Refresh your LinkedIn. Practice your interview answers. Network strategically. Know your worth.

All useful. All important. All completely premature if you haven’t done the work on the other side of the gap first.

Because if you don’t know what you actually need – not what sounds reasonable, not what looks good, not what you think you should want, but what you genuinely, specifically need to do your best work and feel like yourself – then no amount of CV polishing is going to get you to the right place.

My friend understood this. That’s why she stopped.

Most of us don’t stop. We apply for jobs from a place of exhaustion and relief-seeking. We accept offers that feel like an improvement on what we’re leaving. We start new roles with optimism and six months later find ourselves back in familiar territory wondering what went wrong.

What this series is about

Before You Run is a series about the gap. About the questions you need to answer before you start updating your CV, before you reach out to recruiters, before you accept the next offer that lands on the table.

It’s not about staying in a role that isn’t working. Leave. You probably should leave. The impulse to go is almost certainly valid.

But before you run – do the thinking first. Understand what broke. Understand what you actually need. Understand the pattern you might be carrying with you into the next role if you don’t stop to look at it.

That’s what this series is for.

Over the next eight posts we’re going to look at the real reasons roles don’t work – not the surface explanations but the structural and personal ones underneath them. We’re going to ask the uncomfortable questions that most people skip. And we’re going to figure out what a genuinely good next move actually looks like, as opposed to just a different one.

Not all of us can take a summer. But we can all take the time to ask the right questions before we move. And that starts here.

If you want a starting point, the Engineering Career Clarity Guide is exactly that – a structured hour of honest questions before you do anything else. It’s free and it’s the right place to begin.