Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career

Three innovators offer a road-tested framework for career development that helps anyone make real progress on their path when they switch jobs.

Each year, an estimated 1 billion people switch jobs worldwide. A lucky few stumble into the role of their dreams, but hundreds of millions are disappointed. What if, when looking for a job, we could make more informed choices to better select the opportunity we seize? What if the power to move along our career paths lies with each of us, as opposed to hiring managers or the market?

According to the “Jobs to Be Done” theory of product design—customers don’t simply buy products; they recruit them to do specific jobs that solve a problem. Job Moves adopts this model to view jobs as positions we “hire” to help us make progress in our lives and careers. Based on research conducted with over a thousand professionals at all stages of their careers, Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn, and Bob Moesta find that this notion bears out no matter your age, stage, or trajectory.

Key to this new, universal approach is understanding our priorities at the specific moment when we make each move. This team has created a process to help individuals identify the current circumstances driving them to look for new opportunities, the experiences they hope to gain in a new job, what tradeoffs they’ll gladly make in return, and how to learn-before-switching if a new job will deliver. The result encourages job seekers to look beyond a title or company for a more holistic view and ask not what you can do in a job, but what a potential job can do for you.

Full of useful activities and tools, Job Moves offers the timeless framework of our generation to help anyone create a career that will be happier and more fulfilling.

Ethan Bernstein is the Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches the Developing Yourself as a Leader and Managing Human Capital courses. He spent five years at The Boston Consulting Group and two years in executive positions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, including Chief Strategy Officer and Deputy Assistant Director of Mortgage Markets. Bernstein earned his doctorate in management at Harvard, where he also received a JD/MBA.

Michael B. Horn strives to create a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Disrupting Class, Choosing College, Blended, and From Reopen to Reinvent. He is the cofounder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute, a non-profit think tank, and teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also cohosts the top higher education podcast, Future U., writes the popular Substack newsletter The Future of Education, and is a regular contributor to Forbes.com.

Bob Moesta is a founder, maker, innovator, speaker, and professor. He is the president and founder of The Re-Wired Group, as well as an adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and a research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He is the author of Choosing College (with Michael Horn), Demand-Side Sales 101, and Learning to Build.