Tracing the Tangential Career Transition

Growing instances of career transition have inspired many quantitative research projects on the topic. Here, a qualitative approach is taken with a phenomenological study of tangential career transitions where respondents have gone through an unusual career transformation in their line of work. For the project seven individuals were selected who have undergone such transformation and multiple interviews were conducted for each of them. From the transcription, a set of forty-nine statements depicting their experience are extracted. On careful perusal of these statements five themes emerged. They are: detection, conviction, preparation, migration and realization. The textural descriptions are cited to indicate “what” these interviewees experienced, while the structural descriptions are extracted to provide a context for “how” they shaped and witnessed the career transitions. In the end, the textural and structural descriptions are combined to give a composite description enlightening the phenomenon of tangential career transition.