One great rescuer when you are moving on in your career – scouting for a more challenging and satisfying role – is constant modeling of your personal brand that you have so ardently built for yourself.
Think about it: when you are looking for a job (fundamentally put), all you have is your past track record, a career spiel, charming personality, and a way of communicating with your prospective employer. But more so, it is rather a bigger feat to convince hiring managers when you don’t have a strong backing, sometimes achingly long gibberish of jobs that lead to your where you are today, but with one strong weapon: your intellectual assets, like a blog, a well-researched cover letter, or a Web site showcasing your potential for a role you really love.
So back to the scenario when you think you should move on in your career: truth be told, it’s all in your mind. When you are not prepped up with your current responsibilities, and when it sometimes get really boring sans challenges (and even if you have challenges, but you are not inspired enough to carry the baton forward), yes, you should not move up (like how J.T. O’Donnell puts it here), but move on.
While having a career longevity in your role is always a pleasant thing to have, but thinking from the perspective of constant learning and inspiration, well, it’s a synthesis of many roles and disparate pieces of knowledge put together. There is no singular way of moving on in your career – it’s actually (how Sheryl Sandberg mentions in her book, Lean In) a jungle-gym, where you’d have to keep trying until you really realize something can keep you ticking and eventually discovering whether you are made for it or not. And so the beauty is in holding up your chin and confidently venturing into what excites you and what can sustain that excitement as well.
So move on, when your role doesn’t move you and doesn’t help you sustain the momentum.
Are you moving on with your career? When do think is the time for it?
