Make the Leap Research· The Deliberation Study
How long do people think about a career change before acting?
By Jon Miksis, founder of Make the Leap · Published 2026-08-15 · n = 22,252
Before anyone takes our career assessment, we ask one question about time: how long have you been thinking about a career change? Across 22,252completed assessments, the answer is almost never “a few weeks.” Career change is not an impulse. It is a long deliberation - usually measured in years - that finally meets a decision.
Key findings
- 94.9% of people deliberate for months or years before acting on a career change; the most common duration is one to two years (35.5%). #
- 1 in 5 (19.3%) has been thinking about it for five-plus years- including an “always cohort” of 11.6% who say the wish has been there as long as they can remember. #
- The deliberation gap: with a modal deliberation of one to two years, people commonly spend longer deciding to start a career change than typical transitions take to complete. #
The distribution
Share of 22,252 assessment takers by self-reported time spent thinking about a career change, as of 2026-08-15. Single answer per person.
Three findings
94.9% deliberate for months or years before acting. Only 5.1% arrive within a few weeks of first having the thought. The modal answer - 35.5% of everyone we measure - is one to two years. If you have been thinking about a change since last spring, you are not behind; you are the norm.
One in five has been thinking about it for five years or more.Combining the “5+ years” (7.7%) and “as long as I can remember” (11.6%) groups: 19.3% of career changers carry the thought for half a decade or longer before they act. The second group deserves its own name - the always cohort: about one person in nine, for whom the wish predates any specific job. It has simply always been there.
The distribution is stable. We computed the same breakdown over the most recent 30 days, 90 days, and the full dataset: every band lands within about a point and a half across all three windows. This is not a seasonal mood or an artifact of one marketing channel - it appears to be a durable trait of people who consider changing careers.
How to read this
The popular framing says long deliberation is procrastination. Our reading of this data is more mechanical: people do not act because thinking harder produces no new information. A person can rehearse “I should do something else” for years without ever learning what - the missing ingredient is a concrete option set, not more resolve. That is an interpretation, clearly labeled as one; the distribution itself is the finding.
The execution side - how long the change itself takes once begun - is a different question, and we cover it in How Long Does a Career Change Actually Take?. The asymmetry many readers will recognize: with a modal deliberation of one to two years, people commonly spend longer deciding to start than typical transitions take to finish.
Methodology
Computed 2026-08-15 from every completed Make the Leap career assessment with a valid answer to the duration question (22,252 of 22,254 completions; 2 legacy rows excluded for unreadable answers). Respondents are working adults - primarily US - describing their own situation; this is a self-selected population of people actively considering change, not a probability sample of the workforce. One answer per person from six fixed bands. Aggregates only; no individual data is published. Full instrument notes, including what the assessment is and is not, are on the research hub.
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