Don’t Allow Your Career To Stagnate In Silence

I just finished reading an informative article about attrition levels, and the reasons, for those working in the contact centre industry in Ireland. The article highlights the major reason for attrition being a lack of career advancement. For me this is no surprise, as most of the contact centres that I’ve worked in have had a well established leadership group, often having been in their roles for many years and showing no signs of leaving. The reason for this is often fairly common, in that once many contact centre managers attain a particular level of responsibility and salary, they feel content or their ability to advance further is limited. As with any role, you’re only as engaged as the role and the company allows you to be, unless you’re focused on finding ways to develop yourself and keep learning.

Which leads me to the point of this article.

While lack of career advancement is number one on the list, further down at number eight and somewhat surprisingly, is “lack of mentoring/career planning”. I looked at these two incredibly important factors for leaving a job, and couldn’t help but notice how back to front this is. It’s fine to leave for a lack of career advancement. However, if you’re leaving for that reason, it says to me that you have all the skills you need to advance, and you’re just not getting the opportunity to do so. Which is fine, and perfectly understandable. There’s an important point to make here though. The chances that you know everything there is to know in your current role, and the role that you want to advance to, is pretty low. Which means the actual reason you would be leaving that job, would be due to lack of mentoring or career planning.

This presents a fantastic opportunity.

When you start to feel like it’s time to move on to another job, because you’re not getting advancement opportunities, you have an awesome advantage over your colleagues. You’re now in a position where you know that you want to advance, which means you need to sanity check your skills. Rather than waving the white flag and giving up your tenure, skills, and knowledge that you’ve spent years building, you should be talking to those in the job you want to advance to. Ask them what they do each day, what skills they had before they advanced, and what skills they built once in the job. Put that information against a list of your own skills, and look at what you are and are not exceptional at. I use the word exceptional because that’s what it should take for you to advance, when the opportunity arrises.

You shouldn’t be content, you should be hungry.

As long as you keep looking for opportunities to learn and develop, you will never become stale in your role regardless of what it is. If you think that you deserve career advancement because of the number of years you’ve worked at your company, you’re wrong. Nothing is given for free and no-one is entitled to anything. You get opportunities because you work hard, you look for ways to keep building on existing skills or developing new ones, and most importantly because you want to be great at whatever you’re doing. So, hopefully, you can now see why leaving a job due to lack of career advancement is (mostly) a cop out reason. Unless you’re doing your absolute best work every day, looking for ways to develop at your job, while also using some of your free time to build new skills, you don’t get to complain and you certainly don’t get to claim that your career wasn’t advancing.

Own your career. Own what makes it engaging. Own where it’s going.