Your career or job has a lifecycle. It starts, grows, matures, and declines like any product lifecycle. The trick is to understand where you are in the lifecycle. At the start of the cycle, you learn a job, identify your stakeholders, understand their expectations, and develop skills to satisfy these expectations. As the job grows, perhaps with more responsibility and authority, you develop managerial skills. As the job changes and you mature, you expand the job’s scope by taking on more responsibilities or enhance your employability by developing new skills.
You’re going to spend more time managing your reputation – your brand! As the job becomes repetitive and boring, you may investigate alternate career paths and explore new options either inside or more often outside the organization. Remember, work mobility is accepted more often as a way to gain key work knowledge and experience.
If you are career obsolescent, you can learn new value-adding skills or develop a new career. You’ll have 5 or more different careers during your lifetime. Developing a new product is more interesting than tweaking or modifying an existing product in order to extend its useful life.
Life Lesson Earned: Maybe, you’re burned out. Or, maybe you want to do something new. Finding a new career is more difficult and time consuming than finding a new job or tweaking our skill set for a new promotion or lateral position with our present employer.