Make the Leap Research
Career change statistics, from the inside
By Jon Miksis, founder of Make the Leap
Most career statistics come from surveys of what people say they might do. Ours come from what 18,106 working adults told a career assessment about their actual situation - their pains, their constraints, their money, and what they want next. Aggregated and anonymized, updated as the dataset grows.
Last computed 2026-07-18. Every number on this page links to itself - cite freely with attribution (how to cite).
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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 →
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=18,106). #
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 say AI threatens their current job - 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. #
AI job worry, by profession
Share of each profession's assessment takers who say AI threatens their current work. Computed from each profession's own respondents:
What career changers actually move toward
Themes of the personalized paths our assessment surfaces, across 18,092 people - counted once per person:
The through-line: independence. The most common direction is not a different employer - it is converting experience into consulting, fractional, or independent work. Even among the burned-out cohort (9,050 people), independent business is the leading theme at 35%.
Methodology
Statistics are computed from 18,106 completed Make the Leap career assessments through 2026-07-18. 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:
Go deeper
- Why People Stay Stuck: the narrative read of this data
- Career change by profession and situation - the full cluster
- Is my job safe from AI? The worry data, unpacked
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