If in looking back at the years of your professional journey to date, you feel that your decisions and moves weren’t intentional, that you took the first decent job offer, sometimes stayed too long in one place, or made reactive decisions, then there is a level of accidental in your career.
The consequences can include bad moves (resulting in roles that are unfulfilling or worse), a choppy resume storyline, closing doors on other kinds of opportunities and more. More importantly, it can be a sense of professional ambiguity – that is a lack of clarity of what is your specialisation.
Three Causes of accidental Career Progression
From thousands of interactions with mid-career / senior professionals over the years, the accidental career boils down to three causes:
Scarcity & Urgency: When you are not planning forward to create the circumstances where you can have interesting career options that fit who you are, your career decisions and moves will be based on scarcity and urgency. This is an un-managed career.
Niche: Another cause is when you’ve been assigned to jobs and projects that you don’t find fulfilling and yet you remain. Or you have developed expertise in an area that doesn’t translate well to the market. These are often highly specialized, “niche” assignments important for your company, but not particularly transferable.
No Vision: Finally, a lack of a personal vision, goals or plan and the personal belief and confidence that you have a unique role to play in the organisation creates behaviours where you settle, or put up with negative circumstances. You don’t take the steps to identify your unique professional assets and act accordingly.
It is always a wise approach to be more strategic about career progression than leave it to change. The good news is that you can do something about it from today going forward.
How to go about it?
ItFirst involves confidence and courage. You are uniquely valuable and deserve to have an enormously fulfilling professional trajectory!
Second, put the time-in before you need it. The quality of your moves, the pursuit of exciting goals or even taking the important step of landing into an organisation, team, and role that is a better, happier fit for you is best set-up well in advance of when you need it.
And finally, you need to be strategic. There are a variety of steps and levers to move you forward that involves more than just working harder or “getting the resume done” and finding a new job right away.
If this idea of the accidental career progression resonates with you, don’t worry. You can change your trajectory today. If this is something you’d like to work on with our team of Career experts,
Get in touch with now!!
