In one of our recent articles, I talked about the career plateau and suggested some steps you can take to mitigate the risk of your career stalling. The career journey, like real life, is never a straight road and even the smartest, hardest-working and best-intentioned people can get caught in a professional setback.
Here are a few of the biggest risks to career success — and how you can avoid them:
1. Don’t just go with the money
Money gives us options. Benefits such as a house, a car, food, holiday(s) are essential to our health and well-being. However, it’s worth remembering that when employees leave an organisation, money is way down the list of reasons they cite as being a driver behind their decision. Interest(s) and skills match are of equal importance. If you are not interested in a job, you will be bored and will not perform. And if you don’t ultimately have the skills, you will be fired. So always balance the salary against job satisfaction and other rewards when accepting a new role.
2. Don’t stay in one place too long
According to Forbes, staying in a job for too long presents three main risks:
- your chances of promotion reduce
- you will earn less money than colleagues who leave and seek employment elsewhere
- you will become less interesting to senior management
Traditional career advice was that job hopping looks bad on a CV. However, in today’s competitive employment marketplace, employers often want those who have had a variety of experiences – working on different teams, in varied work cultures, time spent abroad, etc. – as such candidates often have a more rounded skill-set and outlook.
How do you know when it’s time to leave a job? Often, the best reason to quit a job is because you have a bad boss. There’s an old saying that people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses.
3. Don’t believe the hype
The earlier we recognise our potential to overestimate our own abilities, the better! Learn to be OK with not knowing everything, and be open to learning from others. Listen to new ideas, hear other people’s advice (even if you don’t take it), and respect everybody. Most importantly of all, keep learning – we will never know more than we don’t know.
4. Don’t expect someone else to manage your career
Ideally your ‘boss’ and employer should care about your personal development and look for opportunities to broaden your professional learning. They should be ambitious both for themselves and you. However, whether this is your current reality or not, the responsibility lies within us to create our own clarity, purpose and direction in our life and career. If there is a disconnect between our own direction and our employer’s direction, see Point 2!
5. Don’t ignore your gut
We tend to gloss over the importance of our ‘gut’ feeling because it’s more emotional than practical, however it’s rarely wrong. What we sometimes fail to realise is that our ‘gut’ is the combined experiences of however many years we have been on this planet. Good times and bad, advice sought and given, learnings, successes, failures… all of which go into giving us a decision making platform that we ignore at our peril.
