Planning for the career moves you expect, and the ones you don't

Most of us run our lives with considerable foresight. The heating is serviced before winter. The dental check-up is booked, the garden is kept in shape, and something is put aside for the family. None of this feels like sacrifice. We do it because we value what it protects. Yet leaders who plan so carefully for almost everything else rarely plan for the moves ahead in their own career, whether expected or not.

Careers tend to be treated differently, even though they fund everything else on that list. We assume they will take care of themselves, or that an employer will. We attend to them in bursts: when a role ends, when a restructure is announced, or when a call arrives at an inconvenient moment. Organisations rarely manage their own futures that way, and the leaders who run them know it.

What we value, we look after

We invest in the things we value, and the sums involved are not small, yet few of us question the need for them. Our health and wellbeing are a good example. In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the average household spent $6,197 on healthcare in 2024, and $978 on personal care products and services. Average gym dues were $69 a month, according to the Health & Fitness Association, and the Global Wellness Institute estimates that US wellness spending, from fitness and nutrition to spas and beauty, averaged $6,293 per person. Even in the UK, where the NHS covers most care, private medical insurance averages around £990 a year for an individual and £2,168 for a family of four.

Our homes receive the same attention. In the UK, home improvement averaged around £20,000 in 2025 for those who undertook it, and a full garden makeover typically costs £5,000 to £10,000. In the US, homeowners surveyed by Angi reported spending around $2,041 on maintenance in 2025, and a further $1,143 on emergency repairs.

We spend this way because we value what it protects: the people who depend on us, our own health and our homes.

A career in someone else's hands

Our careers pay for all of this, yet the investment in them is modest, and most of it comes from our employers. The most common employer training budget sits between $1,000 and $3,000 per employee, according to TalentLMS's 2026 research. In the UK, the CIPD's Good Work Index 2026 notes that employer investment in training has dropped considerably over the last ten years. LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that only 36% of organisations qualify as "career development champions", with a further 33% having no initiatives or only just starting out.

Individuals are no more active. In the UK, the Learning and Work Institute found that 42% of adults had taken part in learning in the previous three years, down from 52% the year before, and just 21% were learning at the time of the survey.

Coaching, one of the most direct forms of career support, follows the same pattern. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study puts the average one-hour fee at $234 globally and $297 in North America, so a six-session programme comes to roughly $1,400, and executive coaching has commonly been quoted at $500 to $600 an hour or more. Most coaching is paid for by the employer. Self-funded engagements are a smaller minority, typically founders, people between roles, or those who want the work kept separate from their organisation.

So the money that does flow into careers tends to be the employer's, directed at the employer's needs, for the role we currently hold. Preparing for the role we do not yet have, or for one outside the organisation, is rarely anyone's budget line.

The same value, a different budget

We value our families, our health and our homes, and we invest in them accordingly. The career that funds all three receives far less, and the difference is not only one of scale. It is a difference in who pays. Upkeep, healthcare and wellness come out of our own pockets, and we accept them as necessary investments. Career development is mostly funded by someone else, and aimed at the role we already hold.

Organisations take a different view of their own future. They budget for change and opportunity before either arrives, and they invest steadily in the areas that will matter most. That sustained investment is what supports a healthy profit and, over time, a strong share price.

Chris Zook and James Allen of Bain & Company studied companies in more than forty countries. The ones that sustained their performance shared what the authors call a founder's mentality, which includes an unambiguous owner mindset. A full-time role can be run in the same spirit: knowing what a career is worth, what is changing around it and what it needs next, and funding that deliberately instead of waiting for a budget line to appear.

A career rewards the same steady investment. It supports the role we hold today, the moves we expect to make and the ones we do not. Sustained career investment works like cover: it is paid for steadily, so that it is there when change arrives. Yet the person whose career it is seldom holds the budget.

Why careers rank lower

Four forces keep career investment low on the list.

1. Urgency without a deadline. A heating failure is visible and immediate. A skill set, a network or a reputation erodes quietly, with no renewal date.
2. Our own plans, and no time for them. A Conference Board survey found that 57% of employees design their own development plans, yet nearly 80% name lack of time as the biggest barrier to developing skills.
3. Returns that are diffuse. The benefits of career investment are real but hard to attribute to any one decision, which makes them easy to defer.
4. Seniority itself. The more senior we become, the more we are expected to know where we are heading, and the fewer people there are to whom we can admit we are still working it out.

Career planning is a necessity, not a luxury

We know there is rarely a job for life nowadays, yet we still plan as though there were. The case for planning does not rest on how we feel about our careers. It rests on what is changing around them.

AI is the clearest example. It was the leading reason US employers gave for announced job cuts in July 2026, for the fifth month running, and the World Economic Forum reports that 41% of employers plan to reduce staff where it can automate tasks. Hiring is also rising, so this is a shift and not a collapse, but a shift on that scale changes which roles exist, senior ones included.

The seats themselves turn over faster than we tend to assume. In the S&P 500, the average CFO has been in post for 4.7 years, the average CMO 4.1 and the average COO 3.3. Investors are a large part of the reason. A record 234 CEOs left their roles in 2025, and a record 32 resigned within a year of an activist campaign. When boards are expected to deliver profitability and sustained growth, leadership is the quickest lever to pull, and the change rarely stays at one desk.

For those between roles, the search is slow. There is no official count of unemployed C-suite executives, but the nearest US measure, management, business and financial operations occupations, showed 719,000 people out of work in September 2026, up 5% on a year earlier, while overall unemployment fell. Search firms commonly put a C-suite search at seven to twelve months, partly because so many roles are never advertised.

None of this says a career is about to end. It says the next move, chosen or not, increasingly arrives on someone else's timetable. Planning for it before the moment is what makes it a necessity and not a luxury.

Career investment matters more than ever

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030. Skill gaps were named by 63% of employers as the biggest barrier to business transformation, and 85% plan to prioritise upskilling their workforce. Half of workers had completed some form of training or reskilling, up from 41% in the previous edition.

Organisations are planning and budgeting for that change. The same planning is far less common among the individuals inside them, particularly at the levels where the next role is least likely to be advertised.

Working lives are also lengthening. In the US, 19.1% of people aged 65 and over were in the labour force in 2025, up from 12.9% in 2000, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects participation among 65 to 74 year olds to rise from 26.7% to 29.1% by 2035. A working life of several decades cannot rely on bursts of attention at moments of change.

It is who you know

It is often said that it is not what you know, but who you know. With longer working lives and tighter competition for the roles that matter, that has rarely been truer.

The research points the same way, and it is not new. More than fifty years ago, in his 1973 paper The Strength of Weak Ties, the sociologist Mark Granovetter found that people more often learned of new jobs through acquaintances than through close friends. The world of work has changed almost beyond recognition since, yet a 2022 study published in Science, using randomised experiments on LinkedIn, reached the same conclusion: contacts outside our closest circle were often the most helpful in finding a new job. Acquaintances are where opportunity tends to start. But few people will put their name behind someone they barely know, so an opportunity usually becomes real only when an acquaintance becomes a relationship built on trust. The finding has stood for half a century, and the work of turning contacts into relationships is still rarely done.

Building those relationships properly is an investment like any other. It takes time, candour and consistency, and usually money too: the events, memberships and travel that put us in the room with the right people. It compounds slowly, and it works best when it starts before there is a reason to.

Questions worth asking

1. If your current role changed in six months, what would you wish you had started today?
2. When did you last invest time or money in your own development, as opposed to your team's or your organisation's?
3. If your career had its own line in your annual budget, what would it cover?
4. Who would you call to talk through a significant career decision, and when did you last speak to them without needing anything?

We invest in what we value. The career that funds everything else on that list deserves the same sustained investment that organisations give to their own future.

Sources

1. US healthcare and personal care spending: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditures 2024. US gym membership dues: Health & Fitness Association figures, as summarised by Gymdesk. US wellness spending per person: Global Wellness Institute, Country Rankings 2024 data. UK private medical insurance: myTribe, Average Cost of Private Health Insurance in the UK, 2026
2. UK home renovation and garden costs: UK Home Renovation Trends & Statistics 2026, Hillarys
3. US home maintenance and emergency repairs (Angi, 2025 survey), as summarised by Real Estate Ledger
4. Employer training budgets: TalentLMS 2026 L&D Report
5. Employer investment in training: CIPD Good Work Index 2026
6. Career development champions: LinkedIn 2025 Workplace Learning Report
7. Adult participation in learning: Learning and Work Institute, Adult Participation in Learning Survey 2025
8. Coaching fees: 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study, as summarised by Leaders Adapt and Climb Up Career Coaching
9. Who pays for executive coaching: Coachful and Tandem Coach
10. Zook, C. and Allen, J. (2016). The Founder's Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth. Harvard Business Review Press. Publisher's page
11. Barriers to development: The Conference Board, Professional Development Survey
12. AI and job cuts: Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Job Cuts Report, July 2026. Employer plans: World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025, press release
13. C-suite tenure: Spencer Stuart, S&P 500 C-Suite Snapshot 2025: Profiles in Functional Leadership
14. CEO turnover and investor scrutiny (activist campaign figure from Barclays, as reported by Russell Reynolds): Russell Reynolds Associates, Global CEO Turnover Index 2025 and Shorter Runways, Higher Stakes
15. Executives out of work: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation, September 2026. Search length: Scale.jobs, Executive Job Search in 2026 and Endeavor Executive, How Long Does an Executive Job Search Typically Take?

Photo by Photo by Meriç Dağlı on Unsplash