I am an experienced career counselor and former corporate executive who has worked in both corporate and academic settings, helping professionals and graduate students make successful career changes. As the author of Career Exchange - Trading in a Corporate Career for New Options, I interviewed individuals who had made successful career transitions to better understand how they made the change.

Through this research I learned that in spite of the proliferation of self-help career guidance books and career skill and interest assessments, a dialogue that fosters self-reflection is integral to making a successful career change.

I know first-hand how challenging it can be to make a career change. After a successful career that spanned 25 years, I left the corporate world to begin studying for my Ph.D. and transitioning to different work. I found that leaving the corporate world that I had inhabited for so long was frightening. What would I do? Could I make a living doing different work? While I was excited by the possibilities of what I might do, I was intimidated by the enormity of the task before me.--for this would be a time for re-creating, re-configuring, and re-inventing my work, my world and my life.

There were many things that I learned from my personal transition as well as from studying the transitions of others making changes in midlife.