You turn up for work every day. You bang away into your under-powered Dell for 8 hours, then go home and try and refresh yourself sufficiently to start all over again tomorrow. But why are you doing this day-in-day-out? Are you doing this just to pay your mortgage, 401k/pension contribution, and beer money? Or it this one step in a grand plan to get you to where you think your goal in life is? For must of us we try and convince ourselves it is the latter, but in reality it is former.
But what does it matter if we are just paying our way at the moment? We know we have to ‘be something’, it’s just not that easy right now with the economy/relationships/Jupiter-and-Neptune-in-conjunction. As soon as things improve we’ll be right back out there pimping our resume. Wrong – it may not be possible to change jobs now, but there is no excuse for not challenging the status quo.
Some moderately famous statesman once talked about the ‘fierce urgency of now‘ – and this is very much the case with your career. If goes without saying you only get one go at this, unless reincarnation is your bag. As such it is vitally important that you don’t fall into a number of traps:
- Not realise that you are in a job not a career – it can creep up on you. You take a role that is a stepping stone to where you would like to be but 5 years later you are still there and have lost any momentum you have;
- Convincing yourself that you are in a career – you start by asking yourself where you can get to from where you are now rather than where you would actually like to be; or
- Being convinced by other people you are in a career – if you are hard working and valued, it is likely that people would like you to stay where you are, and make you feel like you are going somewhere.
Think carefully through your current situation. Where could your current role take you in 1 year, 3 years, or 5 years? What are the opportunities from promotion, secondment or transfer? And most importantly, are you in a job or a career?
