Career Transitions as Trainable Skills: Research Offers Framework for Managing Professional Change

Sarah Wittman, who teaches management and industrial-organizational psychology at George Mason University, has spent years watching people stumble through career changes. What she's found is this: the ability to move successfully from one professional identity to another isn't something you're born with. It's trainable. It works like a muscle—something you strengthen through use, through practice, through deliberate repetition.

Wittman and her collaborators at Northern Illinois University and the University of Iowa have developed a framework built on this insight. They call the core capacities "transition muscles," and they've identified three of them. The first is what they call the content muscle—the ability to tell a coherent story about who you are becoming. The second is the process muscle—the capacity to sit with the discomfort of being in-between identities, what researchers call liminality, and to draw on what you've learned from past periods of uncertainty. The third is the context muscle—the skill of building and maintaining relationships with people who know you well enough to reflect back who you are, especially when you're unsure yourself.

The framework arrives at a moment when career paths have become decidedly nonlinear. People no longer move in straight lines from entry-level to senior roles within a single organization. They shift industries, become parents while working, relocate, start businesses, return to school. Each of these moves involves a kind of identity death and rebirth. You are no longer the person you were. You are not yet the person you will be. The research suggests that how you navigate that in-between space determines not just whether you succeed in the new role, but whether you emerge from it more capable of handling the next transition.

The content muscle develops when you practice narrating your emerging identity to others—particularly to people who can give you honest feedback. This isn't about crafting a polished LinkedIn profile. It's about repeatedly telling the story of your new self, testing it against reality, adjusting it, telling it again. Wittman points out that this works best when you're building relationships with people who will become part of your future, not just maintaining connections from your past. Each conversation becomes a kind of rehearsal. Each person you tell becomes a mirror.

The process muscle strengthens when you recognize that liminality—that suspended state between identities—is not a failure of transition but a phase of it. Everyone has experienced it. Becoming a parent, moving to a new city, starting college—these are all liminal moments. Wittman suggests that structured reflection on these past experiences, whether through journaling or conversation, can help you recognize patterns in how you've adapted before. You've survived uncertainty. You've learned things in the fog. That knowledge is portable.

The context muscle is perhaps the most social of the three. It grows through relationships with anchors—mentors or trusted friends who know you in one of your established capacities and can reflect back a stable sense of self when everything else feels in flux. Wittman emphasizes that these relationships work best when they're reciprocal. You don't just receive mentorship; you become a mentor to someone else navigating their own transition. You've been in the fog. You can hold the light for someone else.

What makes this framework different from much existing research is that it doesn't treat people in transition as blank slates. It acknowledges that different people experience the same transition differently, shaped by their own agency and by the social validation they receive. The framework offers no guarantee. But it suggests that the skills required to navigate change are not mysterious or innate. They can be learned. They can be strengthened. And each time you move through a transition, you become more capable of moving through the next one.