EngineerHer

There’s a moment most of us recognise.

The decision has been made, at least in your head. You’re done. You’ve had the conversation one too many times, or the meeting that broke something, or the Sunday evening that finally confirmed what you’ve been trying to ignore for months.

You’re leaving.

And the very next thought – for most women I work with – is practical. Update the CV. Let a few people know you’re looking. Start scanning job boards. Get moving.

What almost nobody does in that moment is stop and ask whether they’re asking the right questions before they go.

Not because the questions are hard to find. But because asking them requires sitting with a level of uncertainty that feels intolerable when you’re already exhausted and already done.

So we skip them. And we pay for it later.

The first set of questions – before anything else

Before you update a single line of your CV, before you reach out to a single recruiter, I’d ask you to sit with these.

Is this a temporary situation or a permanent one?

This is not the same as “will things get better?” Things getting better is often outside your control. This question is about whether the thing that’s wrong is structural and fixed, or whether it’s circumstantial and could change.

A temporary situation might be a difficult project that’s almost finished. A manager who is struggling because they’re new and will either grow into the role or be moved on. A period of organisational change that has made everything harder but will eventually settle.

A permanent situation is a role that was never right for you. A culture that is fundamentally misaligned with what you need. A management style that isn’t going to change because it’s been this way for years and nobody has required it to be different.

Knowing which one you’re dealing with changes everything about your next move.

Can you ride it out – and at what cost?

This is the question that follows naturally from the first one. If it’s temporary, can you last until it changes? And what will it cost you while you wait?

Because waiting has a cost. It costs you energy, confidence, sometimes health, sometimes relationships. And some costs are worth paying and some aren’t. Only you know which category you’re in.

I want to be clear here: I am not suggesting you stay somewhere that is damaging you in order to avoid the discomfort of leaving. That’s not what this question is about. It’s about being honest with yourself about what you’re working with – because making a decision from a place of clarity is always better than making one from a place of pure exhaustion and relief-seeking.

Are there aspects of this role that you still genuinely enjoy?

This one matters more than it sounds. Because sometimes what we want to leave isn’t the whole role – it’s specific parts of it. And if we leave without understanding which parts we want to keep and which parts we want to lose, we might end up designing our exit in a way that throws away the good along with the bad.

If you still love the technical work but hate the management responsibilities that have accumulated around it – that’s specific information. If you love your team but can’t function under your current manager – that’s different information. If there’s genuinely nothing left that gives you energy – that’s different again.

Name what you’d keep if you could. It tells you something important about what you’re actually looking for.

Is this a problem on your team or is it organisation-wide?

This is perhaps the most practically useful question on the list – because it tells you how far you need to go to fix it.

A problem that lives on your team or in your immediate management structure might be solvable without leaving the organisation entirely. A different team, a different manager, an internal move – these are all options that most people don’t consider because they’re in full escape mode by the time they start asking questions.

A problem that is organisation-wide is a different matter. If the culture, the values, the way decisions get made, the way people are treated – if all of that is broken at the level of the whole organisation, then no internal move is going to fix it. You need to leave. And you need to know that clearly before you start looking, so you’re not tempted by an internal opportunity that looks better on the surface but is made of the same stuff underneath.

The deeper questions

Once you’ve worked through the immediate diagnostic, there’s a second layer of questions that most people never get to. These are the ones that move you from “I need to leave this role” to “I know what I’m looking for next.”

What do you actually need from a working environment to do your best work? Not what would be nice – what do you need? What does good management look like for you specifically? What kind of work genuinely energises you? What are the things you’ve been tolerating that you never want to tolerate again?

These are the questions at the heart of the Engineering Career Clarity Guide. They’re structured, they take about an hour, and they use your actual experience rather than a generic framework. Because the answers are specific to you – and they’re the difference between finding somewhere better and finding somewhere right.

The point of all of this

Handing in your notice feels like a decision. And it is – but it’s also the beginning of a process, not the end of one.

The women I work with who make the best next moves are not the ones who left fastest. They’re the ones who left with the clearest understanding of what went wrong and what they actually need instead.

That understanding doesn’t come from updating your CV. It comes from asking the right questions – honestly, specifically, before you do anything else.

The Engineering Career Clarity Guide is where those questions live.

[Download it here: Before You Update Your CV, Do This First]