Avoid Reactionary Career Decisions

4 November 2015

“I don’t know if I need to find a new job?” 

Sandy like many people was stuck and was struggling with choosing between staying where she was, or making a proactive, yet what seemed like a big, career decision.  In this article we will start to explore the process of making decisions about your career so you don’t end up feeling stuck like Sandy.

A double whammy had hit Sandy and two major career challenges had come together in a perfect storm.  Firstly there was current funding uncertainty about her area of expertise.  A shift in direction, and political will, had bought a pause to a major piece of work she had spent 2 years preparing, and while she had been given other work to do she felt frustrated by the uncertainty concerning the work she had put lots of effort and care into.  In addition there was a climate of downsizing and Sandy was concerned that someone would notice that she wasn’t as busy as she used to be and her job would be in jeopardy. 

On top of this Sandy was facing her own mini career crisis.  She was good at what she did and was considered a subject matter expert.  When there was political will she knew that the work she did was valuable and useful in the community.  The problem was that Sandy no longer found any joy in it.  For a whole bunch of reasons Sandy had been in the same role for over 10 years.  In that time she’d had her youngest child who was now 8, and had taken advantage of good flexibility in her hours of work, an understanding manager, control of her own deadlines, some peak outcomes that gave her a halo effect in others eyes and a 0.7 load that meant she had what she considered an ideal work/life balance.  Only it didn’t feel balanced anymore. 

“I should be happy with my circumstances, but I’m just not.”

Sandy wanted advice from me.  Like many people I have worked with around the question of career Sandy was asking me what she needed to do to feel that she was having a successful, engaging, and fulfilling career.

Many people hit at least one time of crisis in their career, many of us have more than one crisis.  One of the biggest contributing factors to this happening is that we are not good at making proactive career decisions.  And let me emphasise the word proactive.  We make career decisions all the time and the vast majority of the time we are very happy, in the long run, with the decisions we make.  Even when the decision leads to a career move that might be less than optional in the short term, in the long run, it usually leads to better outcomes than when we don’t made any decision.  So the problem is not that we don’t make career decisions, the problem is that we don’t make proactive, considered, intelligent, weighted career decisions.

The typical career decision projection looks a little like this:

In this typical model the straight-ish lines represent when career is going along nicely, when we feel content, engaged, resourced and appropriately challenged.  The jagged lines are when career starts going off track.  Sometimes this is because of circumstances largely outside of your control: a bad boss, difficult work colleagues, a shift in direction, reassignment of tasks, redeployment, redundancy, values clash… 

Other times career goes off track through changes to you individually: the work loses its challenge, you become bored, personal circumstances have an impact, you need more pay… 

The problem is that most of us make our career decisions when the jagged time becomes overwhelming.  We make decisions when we are stressed, depleted, not thinking straight, emotional, reactive – you get the drift.  This is not the time to be making decisions about your career.  At the end of these jagged times we tend to view any change favourably and can get caught in the allure of taking action, any action, to feel better.  Sandy said to me “Anything would be better than this constant unknowing.”

A better approach to career decision making looks like this:

In this model career decisions are made on an ongoing, regular, considered basis.  They are made when all is going well, when you are engaged with and enjoying what is currently happening in your career.  Often times the decisions you make at this time will be to continue doing what you are already doing (the little circles), and that is OK.  Occasionally from this strong proactive position you recognise that something needs to change.  You then get to take action and implement change (the bigger circles) from a solid position rather than in a reactionary way.  With this model you will make stronger and more courageous decisions that keep your career accelerated in ways that correspond to your definition of career success (which we will explore in an upcoming blog post).

One of the things you can do to shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to your career is to conduct a mini-career review every 6 months and then a more major review every 1-2 years.  One way to conduct the mini review is by updating your resume, but for now here are some actions to get you started:

1. 1.     Do a timeline of your career to date.  Include training and development activities, jobs, periods of non-work, volunteer work and major life events (e.g. getting married, having children).  Also note on the timeline when you made intentional decisions about your career.
2. 2.     On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being low and 10 being high, rate the degree of satisfaction you currently experience with your career.  If you are not as satisfied as you want to be list the causes of your dissatisfaction.  There are likely to be both external and internal causes of your dissatisfaction so make sure you list all causes.

As always wishing you a flourishing career.

Katherine