In my view, your professional path is about making a choice about combinations of what I call space, role, and place. You may have made these choices deliberately or perhaps they have been essentially made for you as go.
Space is about choosing the field of endeavor in which you want to spend your time and develop yourself. Not long ago I would have spoken about industries or sectors but I find those terms to be less useful today since the lines between many industries have blurred or even disappeared over the last 10–15 years.
The second question goes beyond titles and the current way of defining positions and deals with the deeper question of what role you choose to play in a particular space. Do you see yourself, for example, working with technology, customers, or finance? Perhaps you are more drawn to working one-to-one to help people with certain things they are not able or are too busy to do for themselves.
The last question in the framework has to do with place and this typically refers to a city in a specific part of the world, country, or region. This issue can be tied to constraints such as family and friends but also the process of clustering that has been accelerating around the world making some places better than others for pursuing specific combinations of role and space.
The idea is to craft solutions around these three ideas in which your past experience will be valued AND where you will have a chance to do something for which you can be passionate AND where you will be able to fulfill your commitments to friends, family, and banker.
The links above will take you to the forums section of the site. There I have listed 10 spaces and 10 roles that I think will be essentially future-proof as well as opened up a section for people to talk about the place they live. I urge you to engage with the forums as that engagement will flesh out the information for anyone visiting learningtofly.careers.