I've just read a really moving study on career changes that are caused by traumatic life events. The study looked in particular at ex-servicemen and women who have had to change their career direction following injury sustained in the line of duty. This was a great group of people to look at for two reasons. First, the life events involved were pretty dramatic. Many of us have faltered from our career paths throughout our working lives, but not many of us can blame our career changes on the fact that our legs were blown off in Iraq. The other reason that this group of participants were so interesting is that the professional identity of service men and women tends to be very tightly bound with their personal identity: they are their job, so a forced change is likely to be very challenging for them to cope with.
It's a qualitative study, so although you can't be confident about its generalisability, you get some really powerful insights. One participant had been a marine and his professional and personal identities were clearly very tightly linked. He said that he always introduced himself as "I'm Adam, I'm a marine" and now that he wasn't a marine any more, he didn't know what to say.
The researchers found that the career change left these participants lost in the world: their fundamental assumptions and understanding about what the world was and how they fitted into it were shattered.
The main message from the study was that these individuals needed to re-build a coherent narrative that linked their past lives to their future lives. They needed to find some thread that ran throughout their careers, that told a sensible story to explain how their new career built on, or at least sat comfortably with their old career. How they as a single individual could autentically be both a soldier and a teacher / police officer / career coach.
I don't think I've coached anyone who has had an experience such as this, but can imagine that a narrative approach to the interview could be really helpful.
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