Making the right career move is a big decision, right up there with the other important decisions you make in your life. While it may pale against the choice of spouse, or the general topics you take up in your educational years, it’s still got to be in the top five. Choosing to leave a job and move on to a new employer will have a big impact across your entire life, now and upstream.

Whether you are in that position currently or at some time in the future, you’ll need to do some self-analysis to ensure you’re not acting too quickly, and that all the elements of a “stay or leave equation” have been considered. This month’s column may be of the clip-and-save variety, because questions like these could be worth a review when you find yourself in this situation.

Relationship with the boss & company
Everyone’s situation will be different and the reasons behind their potential career move will vary; perhaps you’ve had a call from a headhunter with an intriguing prospect, or you’ve heard that the company is for sale and you want to be proactive. Regardless of the reasons, one of the biggest considerations for staying where you are or going to more fertile ground is the relationship you have with your boss and the employer.

Today, it’s not so much rah-rah company loyalty that holds people in place—it is a situational loyalty, the relationship with an immediate supervisor. Ask yourself how that relationship has affected your career growth so far. Have you moved up in the organization because your supervisor has been a supporter, and perhaps you have a significant advantage working for this person over the next few years? Do you see that continuing? Is your present boss respected by senior leadership and still “going places” with the company?

One of the biggest risk factors for anyone is the unknown of working for a new boss. You’ll need to consider what you’ve learned about that new boss, how they appear to be positioned themselves to move up, and weigh the prospects based upon the strength of your present relationship and what it has done for you. You may feel that you’ve reached the top of the present ladder and, even with a sheltering and encouraging manager above you, your options to skip ahead look more attractive despite the new relationship to be built on the other side.

One thing you should be aware of would be what some organizational consultants call a “parent-boss.” While it may feel nice to be sheltered from the elements by this person, he or she may be subtly holding you back. When considering future scenarios in a new organization, ask yourself if breaking free of the hold that binds you could actually be a very positive thing for your career development. A parent-boss may push/pull on the same strings that parents do—using the guilt factor to keep you in your present position.

Physical moves and relocation issues
Today, employers in wide-ranging locations may see your background of interest and want to recruit you to that new locale. For my practice, more than 80% of the career moves that people make are to different living locations—some to a new country entirely. While it’s more likely you’d be considering a move from New Jersey to Chicago than from Penang to Nairobi, it’s still a whole ‘nother world, with its own positives and negatives.

It’s the cross-country or even regional move that involves so many downstream questions that involve family and residence. The most difficult of all scenarios happens when there are teenagers involved. You have no idea how complicated your life will become when you announce to your teenage daughter that you are thinking about a move out of state. And yet, people do this all the time and kids have a remarkable ability to adapt. Within a few months, they are fitting into the neighborhood and have developed a set of friends that have made the transition easier than imagined. It’s not impossible, not at all, but these moves do involve a great deal of family discussion. Even moving from one part of New Jersey to another will require the same considerations.

Second careers in your family? Perhaps your spouse agrees that it’s your turn to make the decisions about a move, and you have the luxury of moving and worrying about this later. In other cases, involve the recruiter who approached you, and the prospective new employer. While it’s definitely not something to focus on in the early interviews (get them hooked first), once they want you on their team their HR department will have some connections to local employers that may be of benefit to your significant other or spouse. Use these links. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen good career prospects develop for spouses through the resources of the new employer, even though they might have initially divorced themselves from placing two people into new jobs.

Another major point for consideration will be the cost of living (COL) in the new location. While it still seems almost impossible or highly unlikely to recruit people from reasonable cost areas of the Midwest U.S. to cities like San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles, it can be done! It’s often a part of the package that is put together by a well-run Human Resources organization. They’ll connect you with realtors to get some ideas of the neighborhoods, and they may apply a hiring bonus or annual (and annually declining) adjustment to your income that will make up for this in time. This may, at least, take some of the sting out of the difference in COL.

Looking up the new career ladder
I hope you are not considering a move strictly due to financial considerations. While it’s nice to get a bump in pay and I’d agree, the bigger the better, it isn’t usually this reason that is number one for the best candidates. Yes, you’ll earn more. Or you’ll have a better chance at moving in a direction that suits your career interests. But you’ll need to have thoroughly examined this in advance.

Looking into the new job and its future prospects requires a different kind of research. The first thing to ask is whether the job you are considering lies in the new employer’s core business. Is it a company with a small biotechnology unit, for example, that operates in quite a different area than the parent company? This is always substantially riskier than the move to a key piece of an employer’s business. Over the decades since biopharma became a big business, companies have built and disbanded or sold their biotech businesses when they were no longer deemed viable.

And the obvious questions about company health deserve your best research in advance of job acceptance. Has the business turned profitable? Have you had the opportunity to discuss burn-rate and budgets with the prospective new boss? How do they describe their future path? Every company in the startup business is working on their next round of financing. I believe that an executive in business development or senior leadership should be on every interview schedule for smaller companies, so that prospective new employees can take the temperature and get a sense for how fundraising has gone to date and how key staff are feeling about future deals that will ensure operations, partnerships, and future opportunities for all.

In closure
Clearly, making a big move requires a lot of analysis, both factual and emotional. I enjoy working with both scientists and business people. A scientist may make a decision only after going through a very analytical fact-finding mission, while a salesperson might take a stab at that but then decide finally based on how it “feels.” Whether you are an emotional or analytical decision maker, I hope that this month’s article helps you determine the factors that need to be considered in your process.

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David G. Jensen
Contributing Editor

Dave Jensen, President of CTI Executive search, is an executive recruiter with 30 years of experience in biopharma recruitment, and he can be reached at davejensen@careertrax.com. See his website at www.careertrax.com for hundreds of open positions across the industry.