There is a peculiar inertia in the way we talk about careers. Actually, scratch that, it is a confidence eroding myth—it is the 'pivot'. It occurs when someone changes roles, industries, or disciplines, and are told by some fatuous hiring manager that they are pivoting—as though careers were gymnastic floor routines and professionals must now stick the landing. It's a word soaked in ignorance and implied reinvention, a term that attempts to flatter with notions of agility while quietly erasing experience, devaluing self, and undermining confidence. And like many buzzwords with TED Talk charisma and shallow roots, the pivot metaphor has a dark underbelly: it suggests you're starting over and your life to date is valueless.
But what if we resisted that erasure? What if, instead of pivots, we spoke of 'stacking experience'—of accumulating skills, achievements, and wisdom in layers, building a platform from which to do higher-order work?
Career development, after all, is not a game of snakes and ladders where a wrong turn sends you back to start. Nor is it a series of clean slates, as if switching from marketing to product management renders your hard-won political acumen, stakeholder influence, and problem-solving instincts null and void. As Jack Mezirow (1923–2014) noted, adult learning is transformative because it integrates new knowledge into prior experience—it is not a replacement but a reformation.
The problem with the pivot metaphor is that it conceals the continuity of capability. Delve into any of the literature on careers, from HR Magazines to scholarly literature, and a similar landscape is presented. Though it dresses up the reality in wonderful sounding concepts like 'protean career', in which a person reorientates their career approach to one that is '(a) self-directed, and (b) driven internally by one's own values', and the soaring language of people shifting their focus from 'work self' to that of the 'whole self'', there remains a problem of detachment. Of being fluid to the point of dissolution. Thus, it is essential to draw a clear line between flexibility and amnesia.
The danger is not just linguistic, much less an academic quibble. It is profoundly material. Framing a move as a pivot gives others permission to devalue your past experience. Consider a senior manager in healthcare who transitions to a tech firm. Despite managing complex compliance regimes, stakeholder coalitions, and enterprise-wide transformations, she is now labelled a newcomer. Why? Because she hasn't worked in our kind of tech. The underlying assumption: context trumps capability.
And yet the evidence points the other way. Tacit knowledge, once developed, is remarkably portable. Complex problem-solving, a cognitive skill honed across roles, tends to improve with age and breadth, rather than decline. Even decision-making under pressure—a staple of executive function—is highly transferable, particularly when rooted in structured reflection. Another reason it is critical to spend less time in endless video calls and more time thinking about work.
In short, the pivot narrative is both empirically flimsy, psychologically corrosive, and emotionally destructive. It invites imposter syndrome where none is due. Worse, it gives gatekeepers—often actual imposters—an excuse to talk accomplished people down.