Career inaction: when staying is just a default.
Career inaction is the failure to act sufficiently over time on a desired change in your career. Marijke Verbruggen and Ans De Vos named it in 2020. So the empty months are not an absence, they are the event itself.
A name for the quiet months.
For a long time, careers had no term for this, which is partly why nobody warned you. Then Verbruggen and De Vos defined it in the Academy of Management Review. Their definition gives not acting a shape and a duration. Therefore the months where nothing happened were not empty at all.
Career inaction across two countries.
Indeed's survey work found that forty and a bit per cent of Japanese workers never changed jobs. However, under ten per cent of American workers say the same. It is the same species and the same century, yet the defaults differ wildly.
Also, almost nobody in either country experiences their own pattern as a choice.
The excuse that cannot explain a gap.
You may tell yourself you stay for the money, the timing or the market. But none of those reasons explains a forty point gap between Osaka and Ohio. So the pattern looks more like a default than a reasoned choice.
Measure your own career inaction tonight.
Write the career change you wanted and the month you first wanted it.
Then count the months since, and write that number beside it.
From the book.
Notice what that definition does to you. It makes not acting into a thing, with a shape and a duration, rather than an absence, and it says the months in which nothing happened were not empty. They were the event itself.
I Want to Start a Business but I Can't Quit My Job, chapter 7: Why you have not decided already
Questions about career inaction.
What is career inaction?
It is the failure to act sufficiently over some period of time on a desired change in your career.
Who defined the term?
Marijke Verbruggen and Ans De Vos set it down in 2020 in the Academy of Management Review.
Why do national figures matter here?
Because money or timing cannot explain a forty point gap between countries. Instead, the gap points to defaults.
Read the whole chapter.
This lesson covers one section of chapter 7, “Why you have not decided already”. The book goes further, with the full evidence, the stories and every exercise.
Lessons in this chapter.
- 01 Status quo bias examples: why your job never ends.
- 02 Omission bias: why not acting feels safer.
- 03 Career inaction: when staying is just a default.
- 04 Reversal test: would you take your job again.
- 05 When to kill a side project: the day you knew.
- 06 Parents chose my career: the first step was theirs.
- 07 Should I quit my job test: reading your answer.