Latest / Career Coaching with Fexingo: Professional Coaches, Career Counselors, and Guidance for Workers / How a Career Walkabout Can Uncover Your Next Move
Transcript
- Lucas: I want to start today with a number: according to LinkedIn data from last year, the average person changes jobs about twelve times over their career, but the average person only seriously explores maybe three entirely different roles before they land on the one they actually stay with. Luna: That's a pretty narrow funnel for something that takes up half your waking hours. Lucas: Right. And I think the reason is most of us treat career exploration like a high-stakes exam — we only look when we're desperate, and then we try to cram an entire industry's worth of research into two weeks. So today I want to talk about a lower-stakes, more iterative approach that I'm calling a career walkabout. Luna: Walkabout — like the Australian Aboriginal practice of a temporary journey into the bush to reconnect with the land? Or more like the tech term for wandering around a new codebase? Lucas: A bit of both, honestly. The idea is you deliberately set aside time — say, thirty minutes a week for a month — to wander into professional territory you don't normally inhabit. Not to apply for jobs, not to network for a purpose, just to scout. You talk to people in different functions, read about industries you've never considered, maybe shadow a colleague for an afternoon. Luna: I like that it's explicitly not a job search. The pressure is off. You're just gathering data. Lucas: Exactly. And I want to anchor this with a real example. I talked to a marketing manager named Priya — she was about six years into her career at a mid-sized software company, good at her job, but felt like she was on autopilot. She didn't want to leave her company, but she also didn't know what else she might want to do. Luna: That feeling is so common — you're not unhappy enough to quit, but you're not stimulated enough to stay engaged. Lucas: So Priya decided to run a walkabout. She gave herself four weeks. Week one, she had coffee with someone from product management — not to ask for a job, just to understand what their day looks like, what problems they solve, what they find frustrating. Week two, she talked to a data analyst who worked on the marketing team's dashboards. Week three, she sat in on a product strategy meeting as an observer. Week four, she spent a few hours tinkering with a side project — she wrote a mock product requirements doc for a feature she wished existed. Luna: That's the scout, test, reflect method in action. She scouted with conversations, tested with a small artifact, and then she could reflect on what energised her. Lucas: And what she found surprised her. She had gone in assuming she might want to move into a more creative role — maybe design or content strategy. But after the walkabout, she realised it was the product management conversations that lit her up. The trade-off decisions, the user research synthesis, the cross-functional coordination. She ended up pivoting internally to an associate product manager role within the same company. Luna: So the walkabout didn't just help her discover a new path — it helped her avoid a wrong one. She didn't waste time applying for design jobs she wouldn't have liked. Lucas: That's the hidden value. The walkabout is as much about eliminating options as it is about generating them. And it's low-cost. Thirty minutes a week isn't nothing, but it's a lot less than the emotional toll of a full job search. Luna: So what does the structure look like if someone wants to try this? Give us the three-phase model. Lucas: Sure. Phase one is scout. For two weeks, your only goal is to collect information. Set up two or three informational interviews per week with people who do work you're curious about. They don't have to be in your company — LinkedIn is fine. Ask them: what's the most interesting problem you worked on last month? What part of your job drains your energy? What did you do before this role, and why did you switch? Luna: Those questions are better than 'what does a typical day look like' because they surface emotional data, not just tasks. Lucas: Right. Phase two is test. Pick one thing you learned from scouting and try a miniature version of it. If you talked to a project manager, ask if you can sit in on a sprint retrospective. If you're curious about data science, take a two-hour introductory tutorial on Python. The goal is to generate a real experience, even if it's small. Luna: And phase three is reflect. After the month, you sit down and write out what you learned — not in a formal document, just a few paragraphs. What surprised you? What bored you? What would you want to do more of? Lucas: Exactly. And the key is to treat the reflection as data, not as a verdict. You're not deciding your whole career in that moment. You're just noting the signal. If something felt exciting, you might dig deeper next month. If something felt flat, you cross it off the list. Luna: One pitfall I've seen: people treat the walkabout like another performance review. They feel like they have to have a 'result' — a new job, a clear pivot — or else they failed. But the whole point is exploration without agenda. Lucas: That's a great point. And it ties to a broader philosophy that I think is worth mentioning. You know, the reason we talk about these structured tools on this show — career audits, pre-mortems, walkabouts — is that we genuinely believe good career decisions come from gathering better data, not from grit or hustle. And we try to deliver that without any ads or sponsors. If you've found these episodes useful, and you want to support that ad-free approach, there's a simple way: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a way to keep it going. Luna: Yeah, it's a small gesture that makes a big difference for us. Keeps the show exactly what it is. Lucas: Alright, back to the walkabout. Let's talk about how to avoid the most common trap, which is analysis paralysis. Luna: Oh, I've been there. You do all this exploration and then you have too many options, so you freeze. Lucas: The fix is to set a decision deadline. At the end of the walkabout, give yourself forty-eight hours to pick one thing to pursue for the next three months. It doesn't have to be perfect — it's just a direction. You can always course-correct later. Priya, for example, committed to one product management course and one coffee chat per month for a quarter. That was enough to test the waters without overcommitting. Luna: I also think it helps to have a partner. Someone you check in with weekly during the walkabout — a friend, a mentor, or even a coach — so you're not just doing it in a vacuum. Lucas: Absolutely. Accountability keeps the exploration from becoming a fantasy. If you're just daydreaming about a different career, it's easy to stay in your head. But if you have to tell someone 'I reached out to three people this week,' you actually do it. Luna: So let's say someone wants to start a walkabout tomorrow. What's the very first step? Lucas: Pick one role or industry that you're at least vaguely curious about — even if it feels unrealistic. Then open LinkedIn and find three people who have that job title. Send them a short note: 'I'm exploring career options and would love to hear about your experience. Could we chat for 15 minutes?' Most people say yes. And you're off. Luna: And you don't need to have your whole story figured out. You can literally say 'I'm doing a career walkabout and I'm just gathering information.' Lucas: Exactly. The honesty actually works in your favour — people respect the curiosity. And that's the whole point of the walkabout: to stay curious without the pressure of a destination. Luna: I think that's a good note to end on. Next week, we'll talk about how to take the insights from your walkabout and actually build them into a three-month plan. Lucas: Looking forward to it. For now, go take a walk — a professional one.