TAKING THE LEAP

What happens to our sense of self when we make wholesale career changes further down the line? Emirates Woman speaks to the women who turned their 3pm daydreams into a reality…

- GEORGIE BRADLEY

January is very good at turning things around – in theory at least. We make our high-minded goals for fitness, health and perhaps better time management. But what about taking the high-stakes risk of changing careers and completely overhauling your professional existence?

If the 21st-century work-sphere has taught us anything, it’s that we are more than just one thing – some of us are underwriters by day, personal trainers by night, others scribe out press releases from 9-5 and spend the rest of the day creating four-tier wedding cakes just for fun – or so it seems.

The ‘job for life’ is a thing of the past. Gone are the days of entering and sticking to one singular field. We hear of professionals leapfrogging from one end of the spectrum to the other all the time now, but what happens in between? After all, what we see is the end result, not the midnight financial panics, the pendulum swings of ‘should I, shouldn’t I?’ or the manic self-doubt.

The route we’re seeing more often now, is a departure from the structure of corporate life to the free-fall of self-employment.

For Saudi-American Alia Al-Hatlani, she was working in an office job doing just about “every menial task under the sun. During this period of my life, I really took to baking and decorating cakes. It was something I'd done occasionally for family and friends, but it had never occurred to me to pursue it,” she says.