Why a Vacation Is the Best Time to Reflect on a New Career

You did it: You finally took advantage of those tucked-away vacation days. Now you’re sitting on a beach, or touring a historical monument, or just getting ahead on some lingering chores at home.

First off, good for you! Time off is a wonderful and much-needed thing, and it only makes us better at what we do at work.

But also, have you considered leveraging this free period to do some self-reflecting? After all, you probably have a couple minutes to spare while you sunbathe or hop a flight. And for other reasons outlined below, it may just be the perfect time to consider a new career.

You have the distance you need

Jobs tend to be all-consuming: They may technically only take up 40 hours of your week, but it’s likely that your mental capacity still gravitates toward work-related problems when you’re away from the office. Even after you leave the office, it can be hard to think about anything else beyond what’s due soon, the messages you still haven’t responded to, and how you’ll get through the next day. All this to say, we don’t get many opportunities to create distance from work — except when we take vacation.

Vacation time often (but unfortunately not always) means we’re completely unplugged. If we’re not totally removed from our day-to-day responsibilities, we’re at least less inundated with tasks and worries. With this reduced level of stress, we can approach bigger picture career questions with a clear and open mind. And without the decision fatigue of choosing between being present at work and planning for the future, we’re much more capable and willing to take steps toward the latter.

You finally have energy and time

Along with distance and fewer anxieties comes the time and energy to start making plans. All those mental resources that go toward handling your difficult boss or responding to demanding clients or just navigating various bureaucracies are freed up when you take time off to focus on you and you alone.

Making a career shift, if that’s something you’re interested in, is a slow and deliberate process — and thus shouldn’t be rushed or grouped in with other priorities. On vacation, it becomes a main priority (besides having fun and relaxing).

This is exactly what happened with TripleTen student Desiree Bradish_{From Graphic Design to Code Design: Desiree Bradish’s TripleTen Story}. Bradish was a graphic designer before the pandemic hit and she was furloughed. While the pause wasn’t something she’d planned for, the time away allowed her to do some honest reflection as to what fulfilled her. “I was really just kind of reevaluating my life and deciding that I needed to refocus,” she says. It was during this period that she remembered how much she’d liked building a game as a side project in college. “I’d enjoyed it. Not even the game stuff necessarily, but just learning how changing code made other things change, and then getting user feedback,” she recalls.

Seeing a connection between her passions and tech roles, she decided to sign up for a bootcamp for some accelerated and hands-on training. It only took her four weeks after graduating to land a full-stack engineer career track.

You gain new experiences — and new perspectives

Vacations aren’t just an opportunity to explore a new place, spend time with loved ones, and catch up on sleep. They’re also key to gaining new experiences and perspectives that can shape not just how you perceive your life but also your career. Seeing how the other half lives, whether a town over or halfway across the world, gives you a new outlook on your own ambitions and priorities. Facing challenges that aren’t work-related still presents moments for you to build skills relevant to your career path.

With this, you may discover things you didn’t know about yourself. Maybe it took until now to realize you actually aren’t satisfied with your job_{Why You Hate Your Job and What to Do About It}. Or it’s the company you’re not happy with. Or another position is speaking to you. Whatever your realization, it can fuel and inform your next moves.

Just take Jake McCambley_{Taking Therapy from the Outdoors to Tech: Jake McCambley’s TripleTen Story} for example. His penchant for exploration gave him perspective on his career and larger life purpose. By taking a job in wilderness therapy, he discovered how much he valued work that allowed him to care for people. Then, on a visit home, he bumped into a family friend who recommended enrolling in a bootcamp. “She was so thrilled that [her son] had graduated from this bootcamp and then found a job and was really changing up his life,” he says. “That’s what initially put the thought in my head of like, ‘Hmm, I could learn to code. I could really do this.’”

So, upon completing the software engineering program, McCambley had a clear vision for his professional future. “I wanted to work somewhere related to mental health or related to conservation, somewhere that I felt like was going to be doing good in the world,” he says. This led him to apply for and land a software engineering role at Zencare, a company building software to connect patients with therapists. 

Where should you start?

So we’ve convinced you to take some time — not the whole time, we still want to see you lounging by the pool — on your vacation to explore new career paths. What does that actually look like in practice? Here are some ideas to get the ball rolling:

• Make a list of things you like and don’t like about your job: A simple pros and cons list never hurt anyone! Focus not just on your responsibilities but the people, culture, benefits, and growth trajectory.
• Find patterns in your list: Do your complaints have nothing to do with the job itself and everything to do with the people? In that case, maybe the problem is the organization or team you’re on. Alternatively, if most of your daily tasks make you cringe, it’s quite possible this isn’t the job for you at all.
• Call a friend: An outside perspective can be hugely helpful as you define your wants and needs in your career. Talk to a friend, or several, not just to get a second opinion on your list, but also to brainstorm ideas on the kinds of careers that speak to your values.
• Google around: It takes zero effort to whip out your phone and poke around for career options. Put the elements from your pros list into Google to see what jobs pop up, or take a career quiz to further narrow down your choices.
• Conduct a reality check: It’s important to insert a bit of reality into your self-reflection. After all, no job can check every box on our wish list — the best ones, rather, check most, or the most crucial ones. Also, not every dream career is attainable or fitting for us. It may sound great to become an actress or astronaut — to use two extreme examples — but consider how much effort, training, and frankly, luck those jobs require.
• Do the simple job search stuff: Freshen up your resume. Send one cold email. Update your LinkedIn job preferences. Job searching can begin with the littlest efforts that don’t take too much out of your vacation time — and you might discover that once you take those first steps, everything else becomes easier.

Considering a change? See if a bootcamp is right for you

Speaking of baby steps, we’ve got one easy one for you: Take our five-minute quiz to figure out whether a bootcamp is the right way for you to make a career change.