Should you work for yourself or someone else if you want a purpose-led career?

In this article:

• Most people don’t follow a clear career plan, and many of us question our working lives at different stages 
• The decision between employment and entrepreneurship often comes down to responsibility, risk, and what feels manageable 
• Working for yourself offers control over your values, but also brings financial uncertainty and pressure 
• Employment can provide stability and support, even if it means working within decisions you didn’t make 
• Ethical careers are shaped by whether you define your own standards or work within someone else’s 
• The ability to choose a purpose-led path is influenced by privilege, including financial stability, time, and access to opportunities 
• For most people, a purpose-led working life develops gradually rather than through a single decision 

How many of us ever sit down and consciously decide what kind of working life we’re going to have?

Apparently, the answer is very few.

According to Right Management’s The State of Careers report, just 4% of people have a structured career path mapped out, while 40% say they have no career plan at all. 

Instead, most careers seem to take shape through a mixture of circumstance, opportunity, and early influence. The FE Choices Survey found that 44% of 16–18-year-olds want to do a job they had imagined in primary school, while another 44% are drawn towards roles already familiar within their family. This is why role models can be so important; we become what we see.

One of the earliest questions many of us are asked in life is:

What do you want to be?

For some people, there’s an answer to that question, or at least the beginnings of one. They feel drawn towards a particular kind of work, sometimes strongly enough that it’s described as a vocation, a sense that a certain path fits in a way that others don’t.

When this happens, individuals often see their career as a core element of their personality; it’s not just what they do, but who they are.

Many people never find a vocation though and perhaps we should normalise that. This quote in a LinkedIn article supports this perspective: “Only about 5% of people have a real vocation in life. They confuse the hell out of the rest of us”.

With time, we may gain a sense of purpose. Interests evolve, circumstances intervene, and practical considerations begin to shape what’s possible. On the other hand, work can just be what we do to support the life we want to lead.

We move into roles that are available to us, follow opportunities that make sense at the time, and build something that works, even if we didn’t plan it in advance.

Until, at some point, we begin to question it – or, at least, some of us do.

When we start to question our working lives

Questions about our working lives aren’t always sparked by a dramatic event, such as redundancy. They can build slowly, in moments of reflection or, often, in moments of boredom:

Is this what I want my working life to look like?
Is this something I want to keep doing for the long term?

Do I need to find purpose and fulfilment in my work or does that come from other sources?

For some people, the answers come quite easily. Work supports the rest of life, and that feels enough. For others, the questions stay open, especially when work begins to feel disconnected from what matters or tied up in systems that don’t sit comfortably with their values.

If you’re trying to live in a way that reflects care for our fellow animals, for humans, and for the wider world, any conflict between what you care about and what you do for a living is hard to ignore.

At that point, any questions about your future career will take on a deeper perspective. They are no longer only about what you do for work, but about what your work contributes to, and what it allows you to live with.

Exploring other options

Once you start to think about your working life in those terms, the questions tend to come thick and fast.

Should I find a different role? Do I need to retrain? Is it the work itself that doesn’t fit, or the organisation I’m part of? How much does work need to matter to me, and how much do I want it to shape the rest of my life?

Inevitably, questions like this will lead you beyond your current role to what your alternatives might look like in practice.

You might think about freelancing, consultancy, reducing your hours, moving into a different sector, or taking on short-term or contract work. For some, the idea of running a business begins to enter the picture.

Taken together, these options tend to fall into two broad ways of working. You can continue within an organisation that already exists, or you can work for yourself.

Working for someone else usually means stepping into a role that is at least partly defined. There’s a structure around you, even if it’s not perfect. The income is more predictable, and responsibility is shared across a wider system. There is often someone to turn to if you need support, and protections in place if you are unable to work for any reason.

Working for yourself is far less contained, particularly in the early stages. It often involves taking on not just the work you want to do, but everything that surrounds it. Finding opportunities, managing finances, making decisions without clear answers, and carrying the uncertainty that comes with all of that.

Some people are drawn to that level of involvement, but others find it difficult to sustain. You’ll need to ask yourself what kind of pressure you’re willing, or able, to live with.

Running your own business can offer a level of control and autonomy that’s difficult to find elsewhere. You can decide what you will and will not be part of, and how your work is shaped. For people who have felt constrained within existing systems, that can be a strong pull.

At the same time, that control comes with responsibility that does not easily switch off. Financial uncertainty, particularly at the beginning, becomes part of everyday thinking. Decisions that would normally belong to someone else become yours to make, whether or not you feel ready for them.

Employment offers something different.

It doesn’t remove pressure, but it contains it to a degree. There are clearer limits to what you’re responsible for, and systems in place that you don’t have to build or maintain yourself. In many cases, there’s also a clearer separation between work and the rest of your life, even if that line isn’t always as firm as it should be.

If you find yourself weighing up this decision, the challenge is often less about identifying the “better” option and more about recognising what feels manageable, given the reality of your life, and what will allow the rest of it to function.

Where values come into this

When you bring ethics into the picture, the decision about how to shape your future career becomes more layered.

If you build something of your own, you can decide how your values are reflected in practice. You can choose what your work supports, what it avoids, and how far those choices extend.

That level of control is part of what draws people towards purpose-led work, particularly in the ethical and vegan space.

At the same time, it means that your values and your livelihood are closely connected. When challenges arise, whether they relate to cost, competition, or practical limitations, there isn’t always a clear way to separate those pressures from what you believe in.

Working within an existing organisation is different.

You’re part of a structure that has already made certain decisions about how it operates. In some cases, those decisions may align closely with your own values, allowing you to contribute to something you believe in without carrying all the associated risk.

In other cases, though, there may be a gap between what you’re comfortable with and what the organisation requires. Only you can decide what constitutes a red line.

When doing something different starts to feel necessary

Not everyone moves towards working for themselves because they set out to build a business. Sometimes it comes from a more practical place.

You look for options that align with your values and find that they’re limited, or that they involve compromises you’re no longer comfortable making. Over time, you can find that this moves from being a minor frustration into a pressing sense that you need to do things differently.

If you reach that point, creating something of your own can begin to feel less like an ambition and more like the only honest way to fill the gap.

Many ethical businesses begin in this way. Not from a desire to take on everything that comes with running a business, but from a need to create the product or service that they have been looking for.

How much room is there to choose?

It’s easy to talk about employment and entrepreneurship as if they’re equally available options, something people can move between depending on what they want from their working lives.

But we must recognise that we’re not all making these decisions from the same starting point.

In the UK, for example, around 13–14% of people are self-employed. That figure is often associated with independence, flexibility, and the ability to shape your own work. Globally, the number is much higher, at around 46.7%, but it reflects very different circumstances.

In many parts of the world, self-employment includes subsistence farming, informal trading (typically untaxed and unregulated), and other work without formal protections or security. It’s not necessarily a route into purpose-led work, but a way of getting by in the absence of other options.

Work is often about survival, so it’s vital to acknowledge that there’s a privilege associated with having the ability to step back and ask, what do I want my working life to look like?

Having the space to consider that question and act on it typically requires savings to fall back on, access to education or retraining, or support from a partner or family member that makes it possible to take risks. If you have enough flexibility in your current work to experiment with something new, even if only gradually, that’s an added safety net.

For others, that space simply isn’t there.

There are bills that need to be paid each month without interruption. There may be children or other family members to support. Retraining takes time as well as money, and neither is always available in the way people might need. Even accessing education, funding, or business support can come with barriers that aren’t immediately visible.

This is where the idea of choice starts to look different.

When people talk about building a purpose-led career, it can sound as though it’s a matter of deciding what you want and going after it. In practice, the ability to make that kind of decision often rests on a level of stability and support that not everyone has access to.

That doesn’t make the desire for a different kind of working life any less valid. It does, however, shape what’s possible, and when.

For those who do have some room to choose, recognising that difference can influence how we approach the decisions in front of us, and how we understand the choices that other people make.

What does your future work life look like?

There’s no single answer to any of this.

What matters is not which path looks more meaningful from the outside, but what feels workable within your personal reality.

For some, that will mean building something that reflects their values as closely as possible, even if that brings uncertainty with it. For others, it will mean staying within employment and finding ways to contribute to change without carrying that level of risk.

Many people will move between the two at different points in their lives, if circumstances allow.

A purpose-led working life is rarely the result of a single decision. It’s something that develops over time, shaped by what matters to you, what you can carry, and what’s possible at any given moment.