An OT recently joined our team and, a couple of weeks later, told me she was leaving.
It sounds a bit dramatic written like that, but it really wasn’t. She was enjoying the role, she liked the team, and from everything we had spoken about before she started, we were genuinely a good fit for what she was looking for at the time.
Then another opportunity came back around.
It was a role she had applied for months earlier, before we had even met, and it was completely different to what I could offer her. A complete 180, really.
It was also something she felt like she wanted to explore.
So she decided to take it.
When someone leaves, it doesn’t always mean something went wrong
When she told me, guess what?
I wasn’t mad.
Was it ideal for us? No. We had only just welcomed someone new into the team and suddenly we were saying goodbye.
But I knew enough about her by then to understand it. I knew what she was good at, the things she was interested in and why this particular opportunity would be hard for her to turn down.
More than anything, I was genuinely happy that she had the chance to give it a go.
And it made me think quite a bit about the kind of workplace I want Strive to be.
I don’t want our OTs to stay the same
I want our OTs to grow while they’re here.
It’s a big reason I care so much about supervision, CPD, trying new things, building skills and creating a team where people can talk openly about what they want from their careers.
I don’t want someone doing the exact same thing five years from now just because they’re good at it and it feels familiar.
I want people to get clearer about what they enjoy. I want them to discover things they’re really good at. I want their confidence to grow and their ideas about where their career could go to expand.
Hopefully a lot of that growth happens with us.
Someone might discover a new clinical interest. They might take on more responsibility, become a senior OT, step into leadership or find a completely different way of working that suits them better.
But realistically, there may also come a point where something they really want to explore isn’t something I can offer them.
I think a good workplace needs to be able to acknowledge that too.
I never want someone to hide an ambition from me
I hope nobody on our team ever feels like they need to keep an opportunity quiet because they’re worried I’ll be disappointed.
I’d much rather someone come to me and say:
“There’s something I really want to try.”
Then we can have an honest conversation about it.
Maybe there’s a way to explore that interest within Strive. Maybe there’s something we can change or build together.
Or maybe there isn’t.
That doesn’t make their growth a bad thing.
It also doesn’t erase the value of the time they spent with us.
For me, leadership isn’t about trying to keep someone exactly where they are. Part of it is helping people get clearer about where they want to go next.
Your career needs can change too
The whole experience got me thinking about our own careers as OTs.
A job can be exactly what you need at one point in your life and then, a few years later, things feel different.
Maybe flexibility matters more now.
Maybe your clinical interests have changed.
Maybe you want stronger supervision or more opportunities to learn.
You might want more variety, more responsibility, more leadership, or less of it.
And life outside work changes as well. What suited you at 24 might not suit you at 34.
That doesn’t mean you made the wrong decision back then.
The job may have been exactly right for that version of you.
What you need from your career has simply changed.
We ask our clients this question all the time
There’s something slightly funny about this as an OT.
We spend so much of our working lives helping other people review their goals, environments, routines and priorities.
We ask questions like:
“Is this still working for you?”
“What matters to you now?”
“What would you like to do differently?”
“What’s changed?”
Yet I’m not sure we always remember to ask ourselves the same questions.
It’s very easy to keep moving through your career because nothing is obviously wrong.
But nothing needs to be terribly wrong for something else to feel more right.
A moment to check in
So this is the question I’ve been sitting with:
What season are you in right now?
And does the role you chose for a previous version of yourself still fit the person you are today?
You don’t need to be burnt out to ask yourself that.
You don’t need to hate your workplace or be ready to resign.
Sometimes it’s simply worth checking in.
That’s actually a big part of why I created The OT Career Check. It gives OTs a chance to reflect on work-life balance, purpose, growth and support, flexibility, wellbeing and where they feel their career is heading.
You’ll see where you currently sit between Surviving, Coasting and Thriving, along with practical ideas based on your results.
And if reflections like this are your thing, I share them regularly through Strive Notes, my short email newsletter for OTs.
No big corporate updates. Mostly things I’ve noticed, learnt or found myself thinking about while working in OT and building Strive.
