This morning, I sat with a small group of around ten people in Basel and talked about something that has become deeply personal to me over the last few years:
Changing career direction after more than 20 years in technology.
The session was hosted by Hello 50:50 World Basel, and instead of doing a presentation, Sylvia and I decided to make it a conversation.
She asked me four questions.
About the career I had built.
About why I changed direction.
About what success means to me now.
And about whether changing careers after 20 years meant starting all over again.
What I loved was that it didn’t stay my conversation for very long.
People asked questions. They shared their own stories quite openly. We spoke about culture and conditioning, the careers we were taught to aspire to, why we assume careers should be linear, and what happens when the things that once represented success no longer feel quite as important.
And when we started talking about money versus time, I could almost see little sparks around the table.
That conversation stayed with me.
So I came home wanting to put some of it down in words.
My career was never as linear as it looks on LinkedIn
When Sylvia asked me to describe my professional journey before changing direction, my first thought was: “Extremely different from what it looks like today.“
Challenging. Exciting. Full of adrenaline rushes and dopamine hits.
Also stressful. Sometimes extremely unfair. And, at times, completely overwhelming.
I’m a Computer Science engineer by education. I started my career in product organisations – first Oracle and then SAP – in hardcore technical roles. I wrote code.
And while I enjoyed technology, something bothered me quite early: I couldn’t see the bigger picture.
I wanted to understand why we were building something. What problem were we solving? How did technology connect to the business? Who was making those decisions?
After almost eight years in technical roles, I wanted to move towards something more strategic.
That transition wasn’t easy.
Once you’ve spent years doing something, people become very good at telling you what you are.
You’re technical.
This is what you’re good at.
This is where you belong.
Eventually, I moved into industry with Johnson & Johnson and suddenly many of the missing pieces started coming together. I could connect business and IT. I became involved in strategic decision-making, transformation and process re-engineering.
Then came Unilever, and another big step forward.
And then life happened.
I left my job to move to Switzerland.
I arrived here with what I can now admit was a little bit of arrogance: How hard can finding another job really be?
Well.
Turns out the Swiss job market is remarkably good at humbling you. 🙂
So I went back to university. I completed my Master’s in Business & Information Systems at FHNW – the same university where I work today.
At the time, I probably didn’t appreciate that period enough. Looking back, it was incredibly special.
I was learning again. I was spending some of the most precious years with my daughter. I was figuring out how to build a life in a completely new country.
And my endless attempt to figure out “How to Switzerland” eventually became part of the reason My Swiss Story was born.
Eventually, I returned to corporate technology. IBM first, and then Accenture.
Accenture gave me some of the richest lessons of my career – professionally and personally. I grew into senior leadership, worked with large teams and complex organisations, and learned an enormous amount about business, technology and, perhaps most importantly, people.
Then last year, after more than two decades in that world, I left.
Today, instead of working in the technology industry, I spend much of my time preparing the next generation of people who will enter it. When I look backwards, it can almost resemble a carefully constructed career story.
It wasn’t.
Careers often look linear only when we tell the story backwards.
I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to change careers
The second question Sylvia asked was whether there had been one particular moment when I knew I wanted something different.
I wish I had a dramatic answer.
I don’t.
It was a series of moments.
And let’s be fair: I think most people in corporate life have a moment approximately once a day when they think: That’s it. I’m quitting and moving to the mountains.
That isn’t necessarily a sign that you need to change careers.
My own transition began somewhere I hadn’t expected.
When I was doing my Master’s at FHNW, my thesis supervisor and I developed a friendship that continued long after my thesis was finished.
She wanted me to pursue a PhD.
I wanted to get back into corporate life.
I won that argument. 🙂
But we stayed in touch.
Not because either of us needed something from the other. We exchanged life updates. Occasionally I’d write something and she’d review it. And, in true Swiss fashion, we’d schedule coffee or lunch three months in advance.
Then one day in 2020 she asked me whether I’d be interested in teaching a course in an area I’d been working in professionally for years.
Teaching had never been on my bucket list.
I had never imagined myself as a lecturer.
But I said yes.
And 2020, as we all know, was obviously the ideal year to try teaching for the first time. 🙂
It was overwhelming. Challenging. There was an enormous amount to learn.
And I fell in love with it.
There is something quite beautiful about someone else seeing a possibility in you before you can see it yourself.
So I kept teaching. One module a year. Sometimes the whole module, sometimes parts of it.
But I still had absolutely no intention of becoming an academic full-time.
Teaching was simply the icing on an already very full cake.
Until slowly, it wasn’t.
It took five years between teaching my first class and moving completely into academia.
That matters because we often talk about career changes as courageous leaps.
Mine wasn’t.
I tested. I learned. I waited. I continued building my corporate career while exploring something else.
And eventually the right opportunity appeared.
Someone asked me this morning how I actually made the switch, and I think that’s important too: I didn’t operate purely on instinct.
It was a very calculated transition.
I have a family. I have responsibilities. I wasn’t prepared to romanticise reinvention at the expense of everything else.
Sometimes changing direction doesn’t require blowing up your existing life.
Sometimes it begins simply by remaining curious enough to try something new.
For me, teaching was almost like a love affair.
I didn’t plan it. It just kept becoming more important until eventually I couldn’t ignore it.
At some point, my definition of success changed
For most of my professional life, I had a fairly conventional definition of success.
Climb the corporate ladder. Keep progressing. Eventually become Partner.
And yes, see a rather nice figure credited to my bank account every month.
I don’t feel the need to pretend otherwise.
I wanted those things.
And for a long time, I was on that path.
Until suddenly, that definition didn’t fit quite as well anymore.
This became one of the most interesting parts of our conversation this morning because success isn’t something we define in isolation.
It is shaped by our families.
Our cultures.
Our communities.
Our education.
The people around us.
And years of conditioning about what an ambitious person is supposed to want.
For me, somewhere after turning 40, something shifted.
The things that had given me enormous adrenaline and satisfaction didn’t have quite the same pull.
My ambition hadn’t disappeared.
My ambition had changed.
And increasingly, another currency became incredibly important to me:
Time.
Control over my time.
The ability to decide where I put my energy.
Teaching. Research. My Swiss Story. Creating things. Being with people I care about.
When we spoke about this today, I could see something change around the table.
Those little sparks.
Because perhaps many of us spend the first part of our careers trying to earn more money, without thinking enough about the point at which time itself becomes a form of wealth.
This isn’t me saying money doesn’t matter.
Of course it does.
Financial security matters. Responsibilities matter. Ambition matters.
I haven’t stopped being ambitious.
I’ve simply stopped allowing salary and title to be the only measures of whether I’m succeeding.
And perhaps one of the greatest privileges we can earn as our careers progress is the ability to ask: What do I want success to mean now?
Not what did it mean when I was 25.
Not what should it mean according to everyone around me.
What does it mean to me now?
Changing direction didn’t mean throwing away 20 years
The last question Sylvia asked me was whether I felt like I had started again.
My answer was easy.
No.
In fact, I’d previously been offered opportunities at the university that I chose not to take because they genuinely would have required me to start from the beginning.
And after more than 20 years in industry, I knew two things.
I knew what I was good at. But perhaps more importantly, I knew what was good for me.
Today, almost everything from those two decades comes into my classroom.
Students are often far more interested in hearing about something that actually happened inside an organisation than simply seeing another theoretical framework on a slide.
We simulate situations.
We talk about what happens when theory collides with organisational politics, budgets, deadlines, technology and actual human beings.
And because I’ve recently come from that world, I’m very conscious of the environment my students are preparing to enter.
I don’t just want them to know frameworks and tools.
I want them to understand when to use them, why to use them, when not to use them, and how to make decisions when there isn’t one obvious answer.
So I don’t look at my previous career as 20 years I left behind.
Quite the opposite.
I didn’t leave those 20 years behind. I changed what I was doing with them.
Sometimes I even think I did all of it so that one day I could give some of it back to the next generation of IT professionals.
And then there is another unexpected part of this chapter.
I spend a significant amount of my working life with Gen Z.
I entered academia thinking about everything my experience could give them.
Turns out, I’m learning just as much from them.
That might be one of my favourite parts of this entire reinvention.
Maybe we need to stop asking whether it’s too late
What stayed with me most from this morning wasn’t actually anything I said.
It was listening to everyone else.
Around a table of roughly ten people were different countries, cultures, professions, stages of life and versions of success.
People spoke openly about their own journeys.
There were questions about how to make a transition practically.
There were stories about careers that hadn’t gone in straight lines.
We talked about the expectations our cultures place upon us and how deeply our professional identities can become entangled with titles, organisations and salaries.
And I realised again how many people are quietly reconsidering some part of their professional lives.
Not necessarily because they’re unhappy.
Not necessarily because they want to resign tomorrow.
But because the person who defined success ten or twenty years ago isn’t necessarily the same person sitting here today.
Maybe career reinvention doesn’t always begin with the courage to quit.
Sometimes it begins with the courage to question.
- Is this still what I want?
- Whose definition of success am I following?
- What am I no longer willing to trade for the next promotion?
- What would I choose if my career didn’t have to keep moving in a straight line?
There were only about ten of us around that table this morning.
But I suspect there are many more of us asking some version of the same questions.
And maybe you don’t need to have the answers immediately.
My own answer took five years.
Sometimes the next chapter begins simply because you finally allow yourself to ask a different question.
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