Sometimes, being good at your job can be a lonely and frustrating experience. You fulfill your job duties exceptionally well—going beyond the bare bones tasks—but for a variety of reasons, you are unsatisfied and gaining no forward momentum. The bad news is you’re in a career rut. The good news is there are things you can do to get out of it.
Sophia Nelson, public speaker and author of Black Woman Redefined: Dispelling Myths and Discovering Fulfillment in the Age of Michelle Obama (BenBella Books; $24.95), offers four ways to shake off the stagnant energy and get the boost you need:
SWIMMING IN THE SMALL POND
ACTION: Get a good mentor.
There are pros and cons to working at a small company, with one of the biggest being the ability to utilize your creativity. When your job description encompasses several roles, you have no choice but to be creative. However, one of the biggest cons to working for a small company is that sometimes you reach the top of that company’s career ladder very quickly, and there’s no opportunities or resources to move ahead or do anything new or different within that company.
Cherish Samuels, a project engineer in Chicago, found that the small company she worked for just didn’t suit her professional goals. “I made a little progress during the year-and-a-half I was with them, but I regularly asked for the freedom, support and resources that were necessary to grow the company in the new Midwestern office and I wasn’t getting what I needed.â€
Nelson advices workers like Samuels to seek guidance from a mentor. “Get a good [one] who will invest in you as a professional and help get you to the next level.” Nelson believes this is especially critical for black women in the 21st-century workplace.
If you don’t have an in-house mentor to help you hone your skills, but you definitely want to stay at your company, get some outside help. Work with that person to come up with creative projects/ideas that will help stimulate growth in your professional development as well as the company.
BOXED IN AT A LARGER COMPANY
ACTION: Create a new position for yourself or expand your current one.
At large corporations, where employee handbooks are inches thick, there is often a very specific tried and true manner in which they expect the duties of each position to be executed. It’s possible to feel like a cog in the machine after a while even if you are good at your job and are well-compensated for it.
“One of the things I advocate for strongly is that black women have the courage to change the game, not play it,†Nelson says.
Changing the game can mean a lot of things–one of them being making your own rules. This might seem extreme and dangerous in a rigid corporate environment, but there is a way to play it safe, she adds. Use that awesome mentor you have to figure out ways to fully utilize your available resources and simply just start doing what you want to do.For example, if you think it makes more sense for you to run your ideas by the appropriate department before a presentation, even though it’s common practice to do so afterward, by all means, do it beforehand. You end up being viewed as progressive and creative, and you get input into your project by another set of eyes, which ultimately helps to shape the way you think about how you present and construct your work. It’s a win-win situation.
GROSSLY UNDEREMPLOYED
ACTION: Keep honing your marketable skills.
Unemployment numbers are much easier to track than underemployment numbers. Being underemployed is pretty subjective, but in today’s economy, sometimes even people with graduate degrees are happy to get a check as an entry-level retail associate at a department store. That, my friends, is underemployment.
A Pew Research Center study found that among 18-34 year olds, 49% have taken a job they didn’t want just to pay the bills, and 24% have taken unpaid internships just to gain the appropriate experience.
Life happens. You might find that you need to take whatever you can get just to keep your cellphone and lights on even if the job has little to nothing to do with your past experience and educational background. It’s advised that you save as much money as possible and keep your marketable skills sharp. That means not only the usual step of going to networking events within your industry, but also being an active member of your profession’s organizations. Get in there, help out on committees and chime in during meetings.
If you’re a journalist, join the local chapter of NABJ. If you’re an engineer, get to know your fellow NSBE enthusiasts. Stay in the loop and take advantage of conventions, courses and workshops (especially free ones) that help you sharpen your skills.
STILL MISERABLE
ACTION: Simple: Leave.
You’ve tried all of the previous tactics and nothing has worked. You feel like you’ve done everything you possibly can and you are still desperately unhappy at your job. Guess what? It’s time to go. But don’t just step out on faith. Do your due diligence and hit the ground running.
“If you are not growing in your job, not moving forward, get out of that job,” Nelson says. “Know your value. It is so key, particularly when you are young, to make wise choices early in your career and not get stuck.â€
Oftentimes, when you are unhappy at your job, your job feels the same way about you, and that’s what Samuels learned. “My layoff was very mutual and timely because I was unhappy and bored and they were unhappy that I wouldn’t support their initiatives and plans that I didn’t agree with,†says project engineer Samuels, who now works at a large corporation in a well-resourced, team atmosphere. She was fortunate to get a two-month, paid transition period in advance of her position being eliminated, and she used that time to go job hunting full throttle.
“Finding a job was my job. It was two months of hardcore interviewing via phone, e-mail and in-person,” Samuels recalls. “I used LinkedIn and my alumni groups to get the inside edge on landing interviews. I applied to dozens of jobs, got several interviews and even turned down a few offers.”
The moral of the story is, be in constant contact with your mentors and make sure your social media profiles, resume and skills are up to date. You are in charge of your career, so when you get stuck, it’s up to you to dig out and keep moving in the right direction.