A job for life is no longer a prescription for success. Today, it’s normal to change careers several times throughout your working life.
So what can you do if you want to change your career? What if you’re in a career rut and you can’t find a way out? What if your lack of career satisfaction is so serious it’s beginning to make you feel physically ill?
The good news is you can get out of your career rut. You might need a new, more challenging role or a step up via a promotion. Or, you might require a complete career overhaul.
In this article, I’ll explore six actions you can take to get out of your career rut.
1. Talk to people who are doing what you’d like to do
Find out how they got into their role. Are these steps that you can take too? Or, do you need to talk to more people to get extra ideas? What are your options? What’s the training budget in your role? Can you attend a course to help you move into a position that you’ll find more fulfilling?
2. Find out what you need to do to get a promotion
Ask your manager what steps you need to take to progress. Who else in your organisation can help? Write down your goal with a time attached. Add the milestones to reach that goal and your weekly actions.
3. Seek the support of a mentor
A mentor can provide you with advice, experience and connections. If you work for a large organisation, there’s probably a mentoring program that you can access. If not, some industry associations offer this service for a fee. For example, the Australian Human Resource Institute provides this service to members.
If neither option works for you, think about who you admire in your industry and approach them using a referral.
4. Network
Find out what’s worked for people in your professional circle – how can you learn from them? Even if you feel despair over your career – keep on networking. You never know who you’ll meet that you’ll really connect with, the insights you’ll gain or how you’ll be able to help someone else.
5. Work with a career coach
A coach will provide you with support and encouragement to take action to achieve your goals. A coach can also help you map out a new career path. What sort of coach would you work best with? Are you looking for a holistic approach or do you just want to talk strategy? Would you like a coach that is straight talking or does a softly softly approach suit you? Use your network to find the right coach.
6. Practice gratitude
When nothing seems to be going well in your life, gratitude can turn things around. If you focus on what you have rather than lack, you start to attract opportunities effortlessly. How do I know that this is true? It happened for me. Soon after I started a gratitude diary so many things lined up. The perfect apartment at the right time, free leather couches for my new apartment, a dream job opportunity and a tenant for my apartment when I decided to go on a last minute trip to
Europe.
With gratitude, my attitude changed. It was no longer, ‘this doesn’t work or this is going wrong’ but ‘how can I make this work or what can I
do about this’?
What actions are you going to take this week to move out of your career rut? If you’ve got out of a career rut before what steps did you take?