Office Hours: The Secret to Successfully Making a Big Career Shift

This post is part of our biweekly "Office Hours" video series, featuring quick career, workplace and leadership tips from talent management experts and business leaders across the globe.

Gallup tells us that 50 percent of Baby Boomers, 53 percent of Gen Xers and 53 percent of Millennials are "not engaged" with their work. Compared with their motivated peers, disengaged employees across the generational spectrum suffer not only emotionally from their workplace plight, but also physically. They have higher blood pressure, and they're almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression.

And while a midlife career switch—and its implicit demand to assume the role of novice and start from scratch—may inspire dread, you can at least look to those who have made it work.

Take Jan Ritter, VP of workforce systems at Good Samaritan Society. In this video, Ritter explains her motivation for abandoning a 20-year career in banking for the unfamiliar territory of health care. Key to her success, she says, was her mixture of confidence and humility, her trust in the experience and her willingness to embrace what she didn't know by asking questions.

Photo: Creative Commons