Why People Stay Stuck: Career Change Statistics From 13,159 Assessments

It is almost never that people don't know what they want

The most common story about why people stay stuck is that they haven't figured out what they want yet. The data says the opposite. When we asked people to write, in their own words, the change they were reaching for, 97% did- clearly and specifically. A new field. A business they'd been describing for years. A way of working that didn't cost them their health.

And they had been carrying it for a while. 36% had been thinking about the same change for three or more years, including 11% who said they've “always” felt this way. Put those two facts together and you get the single most important number in the dataset:

35% of people could describe their dream and had still been sitting on it for years. That is not a knowledge problem. It is the gap between knowing and doing - and it is the thing almost no career advice actually addresses.

Almost no one feels alive at work

We asked people how they actually feel about their work right now. The answers were bleak in a way that's easy to miss when you look at any single person, and impossible to miss across 13,000 of them.

Only 4% chose “energized.” Ninety-six out of every hundred people who came to us were somewhere between quietly disengaged and fully burned out. When we asked separately what was wrong, half named burnout outright (50%), and a third said they were not using their strengths (34%) or that the work had no meaning (34%).

Money is the loudest blocker - but it is never just money

When we asked what was holding them back, money won, and it wasn't close: 69% cited it. That is the answer everyone expects. But the data's real lesson is what sits directly underneath it.

Two of the four biggest blockers aren't circumstances at all - they're beliefs. 40% feel they're “too old” or that it's “too late.” 40% are afraid of failing. 31% feel like impostors.These aren't line items you can solve with a bigger savings account.

And almost no one is dealing with just one. The average person named 2.9 blockers, and 76% named three or more at the same time.This is why “just save up” or “just take the leap” advice bounces off: it answers one thread of a knot that has three or four threads pulling at once.

What the data is really showing

Line the findings up and a different picture emerges than the usual “people are afraid of change” cliche. The people in this data knowwhat they want (97%). They've wanted it for years (36%). They are notenergized by staying (4%). What stops them isn't one wall - it's a recurring set of internal patterns that show up as money, as “too late,” as “not ready,” as fear, and quietly make the decision to wait, over and over.

We named these the nine resistance patterns - the specific, predictable ways capable people talk themselves out of the change they can already see. The blockers above map almost one to one: money fear is the Safety Trap; “too old” is the Identity pattern; “I don't have the skills” is the Credential Trap; “I don't know what I'd do” is Paralysis. The pattern isn't a character flaw. It's a mechanism - and once you can see it, it stops being invisible.

That is the more hopeful reading of an otherwise heavy dataset. If staying stuck were about ability, there'd be little to do. But 97% already have the clarity. What they're missing isn't the answer - it's a clear view of the pattern standing between them and it.

Written by Jon Miksis - entrepreneur, retreat facilitator, and founder of Make the Leap. Jon has facilitated 6 immersive retreat experiences, attended 18 retreats across four continents, and spent 5+ years researching why smart, capable people stay stuck. He's traveled to 73 countries and invested over $120,000 in personal development.