Make the Leap Research
Career change statistics, from the inside
By Jon Miksis, founder of Make the Leap
These statistics come from 28,376 completed career assessments, in which working adults described their current circumstances - their pains, their constraints, their money - along with their priorities and the trade-offs they say they would make. Aggregated and anonymized, updated as the dataset grows.
Last computed 2026-10-07. Every number on this page links to itself - cite freely with attribution (how to cite).
New · Annual report
The State of Career Change 2026
The flagship study: the successful-but-empty rate, the fear swap, the runway gap, and the real size of AI worry - frozen, labeled, and citable →
New · Study
What Career Changers Will Trade
Pay cuts, side starts and runway by income: 22.2% under $40K would take a temporary pay cut, against 70.7% at $250K+, and the top band still names financial risk more often. n = 13,383 →
New · Working paper · DOI
Deliberation Without Resolution
The peer-reviewable version, n = 23,684: self-doubt is more common among longer-term deliberators while financial worry shows no trend - aggregate data and analysis code released →
New · Living dataset
The Career Change Migration Map
Where each profession's changers actually get pointed - directions, titles, and income bands per field →
New · Study
The Work-From-Home Careers Study
70.6% want remote - and demand rises with experience, 55.6% at 0-5 years to 77.8% at 21-30. The matched WFH careers and starting ranges, n = 24,265 →
New · Study
The Side-Business Intentions Study
65.7% say they'd start on the side; 85.2% haven't started. The matched side builds with honest year-one ranges, n = 24,273 →
New · Study
The Career Change Deliberation Study
How long people think before taking our assessment: 94.9% deliberate for months or years, and 1 in 5 for five-plus →
Study
The Imposter Feeling Study
1 in 3 name the imposter feeling as a blocker - and it correlates with none of the readiness measures we track →
The headline numbers
of working adults who take a career change assessment name burnout as a current pain - the single most common reason people consider a change (n=28,376). #
of career changers are 15 or more years into their careers. Career change is a mid-career phenomenon, not a young person's move. #
of working adults who take our career assessment say AI makes them a little nervous - roughly 1 in 10, with sharp variation by profession (see the table below). #
people in our dataset earn $120,000 or more and still name meaning, culture, burnout, or unused strengths as a pain - the "golden handcuffs" cohort, 20% of everyone we measure. #
name feeling underpaid - and for administrative professionals it is the #1 pain, the only profession where money outranks burnout. #
assessment takers were between jobs or watching their job end - and 69% of them are 15+ years into their careers. #
The burnout number has its own deep-dive - rates across every profession we track, who the burned-out actually are, and what they do next: our career burnout guide.
AI job worry, by profession
Share of each profession's assessment takers who say AI makes them a little nervous. Computed from each profession's own respondents:
What this table means for choosing a durable direction - the four moats of AI-proof work - is in our AI-proof careers guide.
Where the assessment points career changers
Themes of the personalized paths our assessment recommended, across 28,363 people, counted once per person. These are the directions the assessment surfaced from people's own answers, not careers they later entered:
The through-line: independence. The most common recommended theme is not a different employer - it is converting experience into consulting, fractional, or independent work. Even among the burned-out cohort (13,620 people), independent business is the leading theme at 35%.
Methodology
Statistics are computed from 28,376 completed Make the Leap career assessments through 2026-10-07. Respondents are working adults (primarily US) describing their own situation in a structured assessment; this is not a probability sample of the workforce, and percentages describe people actively considering change - arguably the more useful population. Percentages use the respondents who answered each question. Profession groups are keyword-mapped from self-described roles; path themes are grouped from personalized assessment paths and counted once per person. Aggregates only - no individual data is published.
On the instrument itself, stated plainly: the Make the Leap assessment is a decision tool, not a clinically validated psychometric instrument. The Work DNA and resistance-pattern frameworks are our own synthesis - built from established ideas in vocational psychology and five years of retreat and assessment work, refined against our own outcome data - and they have not been through peer review. We publish this the same way we publish our sample limits: measured self-report from a self-selected population is honest evidence when it is labeled as exactly that, and none of the statistics on this page claim more than the instrument can support. If your decision requires a validated psychometric, the O*NET Interest Profiler and Big Five-based tools are the right class of instrument - our comparison guide covers them.
Questions about the data, or want a cut we have not published? Email jon@maketheleap.co - we answer researcher and journalist requests personally.
How to cite this research
Cite freely with attribution and a link. Suggested format:
For journalists
Everything on this page and in the studies above comes from our own assessment dataset and is published with its sample size, date, and method. For methodology detail, charts, custom cuts of published findings, or comment on career-change trends, email hello@maketheleap.co - we respond fastest to working press. One honest caveat we volunteer up front: our data describes people actively exploring a career change through our assessment, not a representative workforce panel.
Go deeper
- Why People Stay Stuck: the narrative read of this data
- Can You Afford a Career Change? The runway and pay-cut math
- Career change by profession and situation - the full cluster
- Is my job safe from AI? The worry data, unpacked
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