EngineerHer

I spent eleven years in the UK.

It was only supposed to be two.

I won’t bore you with the full story of how two became eleven – life has a way of extending timelines without asking permission. But I will tell you that by the time I got married, I had a very clear goal. I was going home.

Not eventually. Not someday. I was going home.

The move nobody understood

Getting back to Ireland from a well-established career in the UK is not as straightforward as it sounds. The roles weren’t automatically equivalent. The network I’d built was largely in the wrong country. And the Irish pharma and medtech sector, while strong, required a specific kind of credibility that I needed to rebuild from a different starting point.

So I made a move that confused a lot of people.

I took a role that was, by most external measures, a sideways step. The pay wasn’t great. The title wasn’t a promotion. From the outside it looked like I was going backwards – or at best, standing still – at a point in my career where the expectation was forward momentum.

People asked. Some directly, some less so. Why that role? Why now? Why take a step back when you were doing well where you were?

The answer was simple. It got me home.

It got me into the Irish pharma sector with credibility and a foothold. It got my husband into a healthcare system I understood and could navigate on his behalf when he needed me to. It kept us going financially while I built the next move. And it was the right role at the right moment for reasons that had nothing to do with the salary or the title and everything to do with what I actually needed my life to look like.

Nobody else could see that from the outside. They didn’t have my full picture. They were evaluating my decision using the standard metrics – salary, title, progression – without access to the information that made the decision obvious to me.

What a good decision feels like from the inside

Here’s what I’ve learned about good career decisions, from that move and from the ones that followed it.

They don’t always look impressive from the outside.

Sometimes a good decision is a pay cut that buys you something more valuable than money. Sometimes it’s a title that doesn’t reflect your capability because the role gives you something you need that the title can’t capture. Sometimes it’s a move that looks lateral or backwards to everyone watching because they can only see the metrics and not the full picture.

From the inside, a good decision has a particular quality. It makes sense to you even when you can’t fully explain it to someone else. It aligns with things you know about yourself – your non-negotiables, your energy, your circumstances, what you actually need your working life to look like – even if those things aren’t visible to the people asking questions.

It doesn’t feel reckless. It feels considered. Even when it’s unconventional.

And it usually involves knowing something about yourself that the people around you don’t have access to.

The moves that looked strange and weren’t

I’ve made moves in my career that looked risky to other people and felt right to me. I’ve made moves that looked solid and conventional and turned out to be exactly that – solid and conventional and quietly draining in ways nobody warned me about.

The moves that have served me best – the ones I look back on with something close to satisfaction – are almost always the ones that were driven by clarity about what I actually needed rather than by what looked good or what was expected.

The move back to Ireland was one of them. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t what people expected. It didn’t make sense using anyone else’s metrics.

But it got me home. It got my husband the healthcare he needed. It put me in a sector and a country where I could build something that was actually mine.

And within a reasonable number of years, I had the next move – the one that looked like the progression everyone had been expecting, but that I could only get to by going sideways first.

What this means for your next decision

I’m not telling you to take a pay cut. I’m not telling you that sideways is always right or that conventional progression is always wrong.

I’m telling you that the best career decisions are almost always made from a clear understanding of what you actually need – not what looks good, not what meets other people’s expectations, not what makes sense using the standard metrics.

And that clarity is harder to build than it sounds. Because most of us have been so busy meeting external expectations that we’ve lost touch with the internal ones. We know what a good career looks like from the outside. We’re much less practiced at knowing what a good career feels like from the inside.

Before you make your next move – before you evaluate the salary and the title and the company name and everything else that can be measured – ask yourself what you actually need your working life to look like. Not ideally. Not in a perfect world. Actually.

What are the things that, if they were present, would make almost everything else manageable?

What are the things that, if they were absent, would make almost everything else hollow?

Those answers are your compass. And a compass is more useful than a map when you’re navigating somewhere you’ve never been before.

The Engineering Career Clarity Guide is how you build that compass. It’s free, it takes about an hour, and it asks the questions that most career advice skips entirely.

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