The Hard-To-Pin-Down "Midcareer Crisis"

"Midlife crisis" may be many things -- depression, a reassessment, dissatisfaction, or unease -- but a key contributor can be career issues.

But like so much about midlife, there is little hard data on what happens to midcareer adults.

The "Midcareer Crisis"

Some number of people do question whether they're in the right job or career, and wonder what they really should be doing. But much as the pendulum has swung away from "midlife crisis" being an unavoidable part of middle age, there are arguments over whether midcareer crisis is nearly universal, or something experienced by only a minority.

A recent paper by two University of South Australia researchers found some support for the notion of a midlife career crisis. They reviewed a 1976 survey of earlier research which concluded that at about the age of 40, men question the course of their life and consider whether they should try to change it. Many of those studies predated the pop culture discovery of "midlife crisis," and so shouldn't have been influenced by the notion that such angst is inevitable.

Satisfied? We Don't Know Either

Similarly, researchers disagree over whether job satisfaction bottoms out in midlife, or trends upward over one's entire working life.

Our own analysis of data from the largest-ever survey of middle aged adults shows that there is a midlife increase in the number of people who rate their work situation poorly on a ten point scale. But that only means that 10% instead of 5% of people are unhappy at work. Far more rate their work life from 7 to 10. And after age 50, there is a noticeable increase in the number of people who rate their work situation positively.

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Other research has examined what contributes to job satisfaction at midlife. Surprisingly, congruence between a person's interests and job, so much the focus of midcareer reassessments, actually seems to play a fairly minor role in job satisfaction.

Career choice has some influence on midcareer satisfaction. One recent study (Jepsen & Sheu, 2003) found that it isn't so much the match between job and personality that predicts satisfaction, but they type of job itself.

In short, there are better and worse jobs, and your personality isn't going to make you like a bad job or hate a great one. One indicator of midcareer satisfaction is, in fact, the type of job you have at 25. You're either on the track to satisfaction in your twenties, or you're headed in the wrong direction.

Wanted: Data

There appear to be no good numbers for what percent of the working population changes careers at midlife. And for every person who takes the leap and makes a midlife career change, how many trudge along, doing what they have been doing? No one seems to know, although anecdotes abound.

The director of career services at a leading business school recently told me that the trend seems to be moving toward three -- or more -- careers in a working life. His MBA 'clients' were moving on to new roles or industries every ten to fifteen years. They're admittedly an abnormal group, but it wasn't so long ago that they'd have worked forty years for the same firm or in the same functional area.

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Sources:

"General job satisfaction from a developmental perspective: exploring choice--job matches at two career stages," Career Development Quarterly, 12/1/2003, reprinted here.

"Personality Type and the Male Experience of Career in Midlife," Brandenburg and Lushington, pdf here.

"Midlife Career Adjustment," Leung and Boyle, in "Multiple Paths of Midlife Development."

"Mid-life Career Change Research," Collin, in "Methodological Approaches to the Study of Career," by Young and Borgen, 1990. Available in Google Book Search here.

Online analysis of MIDUS data at the University of Michigan.