How to Use Your Values as a Compass to Navigate Career Transitions
A Story About Finding Your Way Home Through What Genuinely Matters
Jack had built the kind of technical career that made recruiters message him weekly.
Exceptional skills.
A salary that had tripled since university.
Work that the brightest minds in fintech genuinely admired.
But sitting amongst the celebration of a £10 million funding round, he felt a profound emptiness that no amount of champagne could fill.
What he hadn't examined was whether the expertise he'd been directing toward financial extraction was the problem — or whether it was waiting to become something else entirely.
How to Use Your Values as a Compass to Navigate Career Transitions
tells Jack's story—a journey from technical mastery without meaning to purpose-driven contribution through recognising what his core values revealed about authentic professional satisfaction. His transformation demonstrates how existing expertise gains profound fulfilment when aligned with values that genuinely matter rather than just financial reward or technical challenge.
What you'll learn:
- How to distinguish between technical disillusionment and genuine values misalignment — and why that difference changes everything about what comes next
- Why treating social impact as something you serve in your spare time may be preventing you from building the professional life your values have been pointing toward all along
- What genuine values-aligned transition actually requires — and why parallel commitment, not a single decisive leap, is often what makes it possible
What's included:
- Jack's complete story
- The values compass framework
- Reflection questions to apply directly to your own professional identity and practice
The Reading Room — Where stories spark insight and learning begins. Read, reflect, and let the power of stories shape your perspective.
The Writer's Table — The power of the written word to clarify thought and purpose. A writing assignment that makes the lesson personal to your own experience.
The Workshop — Takes your thinking deeper, developing the technique into a systematic approach you can apply across your professional life.
The Rehearsal Space — This is where you put it all into practice — the power of embracing challenges and pushing boundaries.
The Self-Discovery Story Lessons explore the questions that sit underneath professional life — who you are, what you stand for, and what it costs when the person you're presenting at work and the person you actually are have drifted apart. Each lesson follows a protagonist navigating the gap between how they've been operating and what they genuinely believe — showing how honest self-examination creates not just greater professional clarity, but more distinctive, sustainable, and satisfying work.
WorkLife Values — the principles that sit underneath every professional decision you make, and what it costs when the work you're doing and the person you genuinely are have drifted too far apart.
About School of WorkLife
School of WorkLife creates story-based learning resources that help people think more clearly about the challenges, conversations, and decisions that shape a working life.
Each story is drawn from real WorkLife situations and developed into practical learning experiences that combine narrative, reflection, and structured application.
This lesson is part of The Self-Discovery Story Lessons — a collection focused on the ongoing work of understanding who you are professionally, what you genuinely value, and how to build a working life that reflects both.
Author’s Note
The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O’ Reilly.