Changing careers
What are the most common career changes?
The most common career changes are moves out of lower-paid, high-turnover jobs (hospitality, retail, childcare, personal care, warehouse work) into work next door, such as customer success, sales, operations and healthcare support; and mid-career switches that take a skill set somewhere better paid: teachers into training and analysis, salespeople into customer success, engineers and accountants into data jobs. Changing careers is now the normal way to change jobs: 64% of US workers who took a new job in 2022 to 2024 also moved into a different line of work (Indeed Hiring Lab, 35 million profiles).
Last updated: September 21, 2026
At a glance
- How common: 64% of US job changers switch into a different line of work (Indeed, 2022 to 2024); Pew puts it at roughly half (2019 to 2022).
- Most likely to leave their field: hospitality (91%), then arts, childcare, logistics support, personal care (over 80% each).
- Most likely to stay: nursing (28% leave), software development (under a third), therapy, dental, accounting.
- The classic switches: teacher to training or analysis; sales to customer success; engineer or accountant to data; military to operations.
- Pay: 60% of job changers got a real pay rise, against 47% of those who stayed (Pew).
Already know where you want to go? The free Career Change Resume Builder rewrites your current resume in the new field’s words, without inventing anything.
What the research says about who changes careers
Two large studies describe who changes careers and where they go. Indeed Hiring Lab looked at 35 million anonymised US resumes for 2022 to 2024. About 2.6% of workers moved to a new job in a typical month, and 64% of those moves crossed into a different line of work. Pew Research Center, working from the government’s Current Population Survey for January 2019 to March 2022, found roughly half of job changers also changed occupation in a typical month, a share that hadn’t moved since before the pandemic. The two studies define “occupation” differently, but they agree on the point: for most people, a new job now means a new kind of work too.
Where the changes happen isn’t random. The Indeed data shows that people are most likely to leave a field where pay is lowest and careers are shortest, and least likely to leave where pay is higher and hiring is steady. That gives you two very different kinds of “common career change”: the high-volume flow out of entry-level service work, and the smaller but much-discussed professional switch, where someone with ten years in one field moves into another that values the same skills under a different name.
Which careers do people leave, and which do they stay in?
Of the people who left a job in each field, the share who did not take another job in the same field. US, 2022 to 2024, Indeed Hiring Lab:
| Field | Left the field when changing jobs | What’s going on |
|---|---|---|
| Hospitality & tourism | 91% | The highest of any field. 88% of the people coming into hospitality come from other fields too. |
| Arts & entertainment, childcare, logistics support, personal care & home health | over 80% each | Lower pay and short careers (about 4.5 years in childcare). |
| Retail | high | About 74% of people entering retail come from another field. Over 3% of retail jobs go to a job changer every month. |
| Accounting | about 50% | Half stay. The other half move into analysis and finance jobs next door. |
| Software development | under 33% | Most leavers take another software job. 55% of people entering come from within the field. |
| Nursing | 28% | The lowest of any field. 66% of people entering nursing jobs come from nursing. |
Source: Indeed Hiring Lab, “From One Job to Another: Mapping Career Transitions Using Indeed Data” (June 2025), 35 million anonymised US resumes, 2022 to 2024. Therapy and dental jobs also had low leaving rates. The report gives rates by field, not specific from-and-to pairs.
The career changes that come up again and again
The published data counts fields, not pairs, so nobody can rank “teacher to instructional designer” against “sales to customer success” by number. What the data does show is the shape every common switch shares: the new job values a skill the old job already needed, under a different name. These are the switches that keep appearing in career-services guidance, recruiter surveys and the changes people bring to the resume builder on this site.
| From | To | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Teacher | Instructional designer, corporate trainer, project manager, data analyst resume guide | Planning a curriculum, presenting to a room, tracking performance data and reporting to parents and administrators is the core of all four jobs. |
| Retail or hospitality | Customer success, sales, operations and logistics coordination | These are the fields people leave most, and they feed the jobs next door that value the same customer handling and pace, usually with better hours and pay. |
| Sales | Customer success, account management, recruiting resume guide | Pipeline discipline, handling objections and building relationships carry straight over. The change is from closing to keeping. |
| Nurse or clinician | Clinical informatics, case management, medical device or pharma, health-tech | Nurses leave the field less than almost anyone. Those who do mostly stay close to healthcare, where the licence and the vocabulary still count. |
| Military | Project management, operations, logistics, security, field service | Planning under pressure, leading teams and running logistics map onto civilian operations jobs once you translate the language. |
| Accounting or finance | Data or business analysis, financial planning and analysis, operations | Spreadsheet modelling, reconciliation and reporting are analysis skills. What changes is the subject, not the method. |
| Engineer (mechanical, civil, electrical) | Data science, product management, technical sales resume guide | Modelling, designing experiments and finding root causes are the same habits data jobs hire for. |
| QA or support engineer | Product management, developer relations resume guide | Writing acceptance criteria and ranking bugs by severity is requirements and prioritisation work without the title. |
| Journalist or writer | Content marketing, communications, UX writing, technical writing | Research, interviews and writing to a deadline are the job. What changes is who pays you: a company instead of a publisher. |
| Marketing | Product marketing, growth, product management resume guide | Positioning, launches and customer research move you closer to the product. |
| Administrative or executive assistant | Operations coordinator, project coordinator, HR coordinator | Scheduling, handling vendors and keeping many things moving at once is coordination work by another name. |
| Teacher | Software engineer resume guide | Breaking a problem into steps and improving on what worked carries over. The gap is a portfolio, which bootcamps and self-study now fill. |
What a career change looks like at each stage
| Your stage | Typical change | What your resume has to do |
|---|---|---|
| 0–3 years | Out of a first job in retail, hospitality or admin into an office, sales or coordination job, or into a trade or healthcare training programme. | Show reliability and pace with numbers (volume handled, shifts led, targets hit). One page. A short skills section in the new field’s words. |
| 3–7 years | The classic switch: teacher to training or analysis, sales to customer success, support to product, marketing to product marketing. | Rewrite every bullet in the new field’s vocabulary without inventing anything. Open with a summary that names the job you want. Usually still one page. |
| 7–15 years | A move into management, consulting or a neighbouring specialism (engineer to data science, accountant to FP&A, nurse to informatics). | Two pages. A skills section above your experience if the change is big; a standard layout if the new field is next door. |
| 15+ years | Into teaching, training, advisory or consulting; military or public sector into private-sector operations; a portfolio career. | Two pages, last 10 to 15 years in detail, earlier jobs as one line. Scope (teams, budgets, outcomes) matters more than duties. Drop dates on anything over 20 years old. |
Which layout fits which change is covered in the three resume formats. The career change guide covers how to write the resume itself.
When the usual patterns don’t apply
- Licensed fields (nursing, law, accounting designations, skilled trades) are hard to enter mid-career without the credential. That’s why so few people leave them and why most newcomers come from within. A change into one usually runs through a training programme first.
- A new employer in the same job is not a career change, even in a different industry. A software developer moving from a bank to a hospital has changed jobs, not careers. The resume stays chronological and nothing needs explaining.
- Promotions into management count as a change of occupation in some studies and not in others, which is one reason the Indeed (64%) and Pew (roughly half) figures differ.
- Forced changes, when a field shrinks, a licence lapses or you relocate, follow different paths from chosen ones. The resume should still be written toward where you’re going, not why you left.
What the switch looks like on a resume
Teacher (6 years) to instructional designer
Same work, different words. “Planned and delivered a year-long curriculum for 120 students across four ability levels” becomes “Designed and delivered a 36-week learning programme for 120 learners, differentiated across four proficiency levels, with assessment data used to revise modules each term.” Nothing is invented. The vocabulary is the new field’s.
Retail supervisor (3 years) to customer success associate
Lead with the numbers retail hands you every day: “Led a team of 8 in a store doing $2.1M a year; cut the refund rate from 6% to 3.5% by retraining the team on returns; top-quartile customer satisfaction score across 40 stores for five straight quarters.” Customer success hires for exactly those three things: team, retention, satisfaction.
Mechanical engineer (9 years) to data scientist
Two pages, skills first. A summary that names the job you want, then a skills section listing Python, statistics, experimental design and the modelling tools you already use, then your engineering jobs with bullets rewritten around data: “Ran design-of-experiments studies on 1,200 test samples to isolate the two variables behind a 14% failure rate.” A projects section carries the portfolio work that proves the new toolset.
Mistakes career changers make on their resume
- Sending the old resume. A resume written for the field you’re leaving describes the wrong job. Every bullet has to be re-read against the new posting.
- Explaining the change instead of showing the fit. A paragraph about wanting a new challenge reads like a gap. A summary that names the job you want and three matching strengths reads like a candidate.
- Inventing experience. Translating is fair; making things up is not, and it falls apart at the first interview question. The line: every bullet describes something you did, in the words the new field uses for it.
- Hiding your transferable skills under old job titles. When the change is big, a skills section above your experience is what gets the resume read past the first title.
- Ignoring the posting’s vocabulary. Applicant tracking systems and recruiters both search for the posting’s terms. If the job says “stakeholder management” and your resume says “parent communication”, the match is missed even though the skill is the same.
Sources
- Indeed Hiring Lab, “From One Job to Another: Mapping Career Transitions Using Indeed Data” and “Coming and Going: Where Workers Come From and Go When They Switch Jobs” (10 June 2025): 35 million anonymised US Indeed profiles, 2022 to 2024. Monthly job-change rate, share changing line of work, leaving and entering rates by field.
- Pew Research Center, “Majority of U.S. Workers Changing Jobs Are Seeing Real Wage Gains” (28 July 2022): Current Population Survey data, January 2019 to March 2022. Share of job changers who also changed occupation; pay outcomes for changers versus stayers.
More questions about changing careers
How common is it to change careers?
Very. Indeed Hiring Lab looked at 35 million US profiles and found that about 2.6% of workers moved to a new job in a typical month during 2022 to 2024, and 64% of those moves were into a different line of work, not just a new employer. Pew Research Center, using government survey data from 2019 to 2022, put the share of job changers who also changed occupation at roughly half.
Which careers do people leave most often?
Hospitality and tourism: 91% of people who left a hospitality job in 2022 to 2024 left the field completely (Indeed Hiring Lab). Arts and entertainment, childcare, logistics support, and personal care and home health each lost more than 80% of leavers to other fields. These are lower-paid jobs with short careers, and people move to work next door rather than stay.
Which careers do people stay in?
Nursing (only 28% of leavers left the field), software development (fewer than one in three), and therapy, dental and accounting jobs. The pattern is pay and steady demand: where wages are higher and hiring is constant, people change employers but keep the occupation.
At what age do most people change careers?
There is no single age. Job changes are most frequent under 35 and slow down with age, but career changes happen at every stage: early moves out of a first job in retail or hospitality, mid-career switches after 10 to 15 years, and late-career moves into teaching, consulting or trades. Each needs a different resume: skills first for a big change, a standard layout when the new field is next door.
Do career changers earn more or less?
People who change jobs tend to earn more. Pew Research Center found 60% of workers who changed jobs between April 2021 and March 2022 saw a real, inflation-adjusted pay rise, against 47% of those who stayed put. A move into a brand-new field can mean a step back in title and pay first, especially into licensed or technical work, and a faster climb afterwards.
- How do you write a career change resume?
- Which resume format is right for a career change?
- How long should a resume be?
- What sections should a resume have, and in what order?
- Teacher to Data Analyst resume
- Teacher to Software Engineer resume
- Mechanical Engineer to Data Scientist resume
- Sales to Customer Success Manager resume
- QA Engineer to Product Manager resume
- Marketing to Product Marketing Manager resume
Rewrite your resume for the new field
The hard part of every change above is the translation: saying what you did in the words the new field uses, without inventing anything. The Career Change Resume Builder does that from your existing resume and the job you want. Build, edit and preview are free. Once you have a posting in hand, the resume-versus-job check shows which of its terms your resume still misses.