There’s a particular kind of anxiety that comes with doing something you know is right while simultaneously feeling completely uncertain about it. I’ve been sitting with that feeling for the past few months, and I figured it was time to write about it.

I made a career shift. After spending the better part of a decade managing IT teams, running departments, dealing with C-level politics and all the interpersonal complexity that comes with being responsible for other people’s work, I moved into a role focused on information security. I’m still operating at a high level, but instead of managing large teams of people, I’m now managing tools, processes, policies, governance, and training. It’s still leadership, but it’s a fundamentally different kind of leadership, and despite knowing clearly this was what I needed, I’ve spent the last several weeks feeling like I’m learning a new language in a room full of native speakers.

When You Start Recognizing the Signs

The decision didn’t come suddenly, though it might look that way to people who didn’t see it building. Managing teams was good to me. I was competent at it, reasonably well-compensated, and I had the kind of authority that comes with being responsible for a department. But somewhere along the way I started to notice something I wrote about a few months ago: the signs of burnout, except this time I was seeing them in myself rather than in my team.

The thing about managing large teams is that it requires you to constantly flex into spaces that aren’t naturally yours. You spend your days navigating personnel conflicts, managing up to executives, running interference between departments, and sitting in meetings about meetings. Some people genuinely thrive in that environment, and I respect them for it. But I found myself spending more emotional energy managing the politics of the work than doing the work that actually got me excited about IT in the first place. When you have to constantly live outside your comfort zone just to get through a normal week, when you’re flexing into someone else’s natural strengths day after day, that takes a mental toll that compounds over time.

There’s a difference between healthy stretch and chronic misalignment. Healthy stretch is taking on a project that challenges you and growing from it. Chronic misalignment is spending years in a role that requires you to be someone you’re not, and slowly burning out because of it. I was in the second category, and it took me longer than it should have to admit that.

It’s Not About Finding a “Better” Job

I want to be clear about something, because I think the way most people talk about career transitions gets this wrong. I didn’t leave my role because I found something better. I left because I found something that fit better.

The team management role wasn’t bad. It paid well, it had authority, and there’s nothing wrong with the work itself. But it wasn’t the right fit for me anymore, and maybe it never fully was. The skills it demanded most, the constant people management, the political maneuvering, the emotional labor of being responsible for everyone else’s performance and wellbeing, those were skills I could do but not skills that came naturally or that energized me. I was good enough at them to succeed, but succeeding at something that drains you is its own kind of failure.

Information security, by contrast, asks me to think about systems, processes, risk, and architecture. It asks me to build governance frameworks and training programs, to think about how an organization protects itself and its people. That’s closer to the way my brain actually works, and working in alignment with your natural strengths instead of constantly against them makes an enormous difference in how sustainable your career feels.

If you’re thinking about making a shift, I’d encourage you to think less about what looks like a promotion or a lateral move and more about what actually fits the way you think and work. The best career move isn’t always the one that looks best on paper.

The Thing Nobody Tells You About Specialty Shifts

Here’s what surprised me, and what I think a lot of people don’t expect when they change specialties: it doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have in IT. The moment you move into a new area, you become the new person again, and that’s genuinely uncomfortable.

I understand infrastructure. I understand how teams work, how projects get delivered, how to think about operational problems at an organizational level. I’ve been doing some version of this work for years. But information security is adjacent to all of that without being exactly the same. The frameworks are different, the priorities are different, and the way you think about security problems is fundamentally different from the way you think about operational or management problems. I didn’t fully appreciate that until I was sitting in meetings feeling lost because the vocabulary and mental models were unfamiliar.

There’s a particular flavor of imposter syndrome that hits when you’re an experienced professional trying to become experienced in something new. You’ve been the person in the room who knows things, the person people came to with questions. Suddenly you’re the person asking the questions, and you’re asking a lot of them, and part of you wonders if people are judging you for not already knowing this. I know intellectually that they’re probably not, that everyone in this field started somewhere, but knowing that intellectually and actually believing it are two different things.

What made it worse was that I was expecting it to be harder. I kept telling myself there would be a ramp-up period, that I’d feel out of place, that I’d need to learn the specifics of security work even though I understood the foundational IT concepts. I was prepared for that. What I wasn’t prepared for was how little that preparation actually helped when I was sitting across from someone describing a vulnerability assessment and realizing I didn’t have the right mental model for what they were actually doing.

Is the Grass Actually Greener?

This is the question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately, usually at about two in the morning when I can’t sleep because I’m anxious about something I didn’t understand in a meeting.

The answer is complicated, because the grass is genuinely different, which is not quite the same thing as being greener.

On the upside, I’m working on problems that feel urgent and meaningful in a way that team management, despite its real importance, often didn’t. I’m building things, designing processes, shaping how an organization thinks about security, which activates a part of my brain that had been underused for too long. I’m learning constantly, which is exhausting but also genuinely engaging in a way I’d forgotten work could be. And the field is growing faster than almost any other sector in IT, with millions of unfilled security jobs right now and market valuations that reflect the actual scarcity of this expertise.

On the downside, the adjustment is real. I’m building credibility in a new specialty, which means earning respect through demonstrated competence rather than tenure or title, and that takes time. Some of the organizational frustrations I thought I was leaving behind, the politics, the slow decision-making, those exist in every role regardless of specialty. The work-life balance, which was supposed to be one of the big wins here, is still something I’m figuring out. It’s better than before, but I haven’t quite found the off-switch yet.

If You’re Thinking About Making a Move

If you’re in a role that doesn’t fit and you’re wondering if it’s time to shift specialties, be clear about what you’re moving away from, not just what you’re moving toward. A lot of people frame career changes as being about chasing something better, and sometimes that’s true. But the people I’ve talked to who’ve made successful transitions are the ones who were clear-eyed about what they were leaving and why. They knew their current role wasn’t fitting the way they actually think and work, and that clarity matters, because when you’re in month two of your new specialty and you’re sitting in a meeting feeling completely lost, you need to be able to fall back on the knowledge that you made this decision for a reason.

The other thing worth knowing is that there’s a real window of adjustment here. Most people in technical specialties say it takes somewhere between six months and a year to feel like you’re actually competent in a new area, even if you have years of IT experience elsewhere. That feels like a long time when you’re living through it, but it’s useful to know that there’s a timeline attached to this feeling of being lost. You’re not incompetent, you’re not in over your head, you’re in a normal part of the adjustment process, and there’s an actual endpoint to it.

Communication matters more in specialty transitions than you might expect as well. Being able to articulate what you don’t know, ask intelligent questions, and admit when something is outside your current understanding is more valuable than you might think when you’re coming from years of being the person who knew things.

Where I Am Now

I’m three months into this shift, and I’m still figuring it out. Some days I feel like I made the best decision I could have possibly made, and other days I second-guess myself completely. I’m slowly building the mental models I need to do this work effectively, which is both more interesting and more frustrating than I expected. I’m learning that there’s actually a lot I still have to learn about IT in general, even after years of working in it, and there’s something oddly humbling about that.

I don’t have this figured out yet, but I’m also not the first person to make this kind of transition, and I won’t be the last. The cybersecurity field is growing because it matters, and that means there are going to be a lot more experienced IT professionals making this exact move in the years to come. If you’re thinking about being one of them, go in with clear eyes about what you’re leaving and why, and give yourself permission to feel uncomfortable for a while. That discomfort is where the growth actually happens.