Say your job, a good fit for 20 years, starts feeling like a bad suit, binding in all the wrong places, accentuating your worst features and making you generally uncomfortable. You can’t remember what it was about the suit that made you buy it to begin with, and you’d like to try a new style. It’s familiar, though, and has served you well in the past, so you continue wearing it.

That’s a bad idea, according to Billie Sucher, whose career transition counseling services include helping middle-aged executives and other professionals find new careers. Today’s leaner corporate workforces place greater demands on employees, Sucher said, and as a result, some people are “stressed out to the max.”

“I see people in jobs they don’t belong in anymore,” she said. “Their health is taking a serious toll, but they don’t feel there is a way out. You might as well be doing something you reasonably enjoy than something you dislike.”

Or perhaps job stability disappears suddenly, as it did for Robert Christensen of Johnston. At 60, he was logging 60,000 miles as the top sales executive for the Champion Co., the nation’s oldest embalming fluid and funeral supply dealer. He’d seen his territory expand from southeast South Dakota and eastern Nebraska to all or part of seven Midwestern states as the company whittled the number of outside sales executives from 34 nationwide to just eight. But he was unprepared for the call he got three years ago.

“A week before Thanksgiving in 2002, I came home off the road on a Friday night and received a page from the sales manager informing me that my position – and the positions of the remaining sales execs – was going to be eliminated because the company was going to telemarketing,” Christensen said. “Here I was, age 60, without a job. If you don’t think that’s scary …”

One of his first calls after learning his job was being eliminated was to Sucher. “I’m a survivor and always have been a survivor, so I knew I would land on my feet,” he said. “That’s where Billie Sucher comes in. Through her professional services, it really helped me. For anyone who goes through that, I highly recommend they go through a counselor.”

Sucher advised Christensen to explore the relationship he’d built with Carlton Peterson, president and co-owner of Hamilton’s Funeral Home, while working for Champion. He did, and was hired as an advanced planning counselor in February 2003. “It’s the best job in the world,” Christensen raved. “Carlton, [co-owner] John Moller and I all agree we should have gotten together years ago.”

But the job, which entails working with families to pre-plan their funerals, was a far cry from where Christensen started his professional life, in broadcasting. He and his parents started and owned for 23 years Humboldt’s first radio station and cable television system. At small family-owned KHBT-FM, Christensen reported to work by 4 a.m. most days, signed on at 6 o’clock and remained on the air until 1 p.m., then spent the rest of the afternoon calling on advertising clients. On Friday and Saturday nights during high school sports season, he did play-by-play. “I had been involved in all facets of the business and wanted to try something different,” he said of the family’s decision to sell the broadcasting business in 1993.

That decision brought him to Greater Des Moines, where he looked for a position that would allow him to use his sales and marketing skills. He heard about the job with Champion through a friend, and though the company had since its inception in 1878 always hired funeral directors to fill sales positions, Christensen impressed his interviewers enough to win the job over a dozen other applicants.

“The world will beat a path to the door of a good salesman,” Christensen said.

His job with Hamilton’s is basically a sales position, but the hard-sell approach some outside sales executives use is taboo in the funeral industry. Instead, Christensen builds on core values he learned as a child. “In our business, you have to be caring, a good listener and compassionate or you’re not going to succeed,” he said. “I think I’ve always been compassionate, considerate and caring, but in this job, you are more conscious of it.”

Christensen made his career transition the right way, according to Sucher, who advises her clients to look at the “four R’s” when faced with a job change. They can either replace their current job by moving to a similar position with another company, reinvent themselves by reconfiguring their existing skills, retrain by obtaining additional education, or retire, but continue to use their skills in consulting.

Following a plan like that removes some of the fear of changing jobs. “You don’t fear what you know,” she said. “You can’t let fear drive the cart.”

Linda Johnson’s career transition was different than Christensen’s. She had worked in law firm administration for 22 years, the last 10 at the law firm of Bradshaw, Fowler, Proctor & Fairgrave. In those jobs, she was in charge of all activities that support a law firm, including payroll and employee benefits administration, facilities management and accounting, thereby leaving the attorneys free to practice law.

“I was happy in that career, but I had been doing essentially the same thing for 22 years and I needed a new challenge,” she said. “I walked away from a perfectly good, well-paying job not knowing what I was going to do.”

She had built a financial cushion and could afford to risk unemployment as she searched for a “nice, quiet 40-hour-a-week job” that would leave her nights and weekends free to enjoy other pursuits. Still, it was a frightening period in her life. “You’re taking a leap of faith that you’re going to land on your feet,” she said.

She was employed within four months, though not in the undemanding position she had thought she wanted – a goal that, when she told friends about it, had been met with an eye-roll and comments like, “Yeah, I can just see you in a 9-to-5.”

Through networking and business contacts, she learned that Merle Hay Mall was looking for a new general manager. “It was too intriguing an opportunity not to try it,” said Johnson.

That was six and one-half years ago. “It is the most challenging and fascinating position I’ve ever held,” Johnson said. “I’m addicted to it.”

In her current job, she has been well-served by the skills she honed in law firm administration – “my management skills, problem-solving skills, organizational skills and ability to work with a very diverse group of people, from entry-level to maintenance, up through corporate-level executives,” she said. “You have to wear a variety of hats and you have to be able to change quickly.”

Before resigning from the law firm, she approached Sucher with a list of questions. “I’m 50,” she wondered at the time. “Is this even doable?

“I hadn’t done any serious job hunting for 22 years. The market had changed, resume structures have changed. Am I out of my mind here, or is this really doable?”

Sucher’s answer, Johnson said, was that “there will always be good jobs available for good people with good skill sets.”

“People get trapped into positions,” Johnson said. “They’re unhappy and they think they can’t move, but I think a lot of people don’t have a true assessment of what their skills are in the various things they do. They take them for granted and don’t think about how marketable those skills may be.”