Ten signs you're stuck in a dead-end job

What’s important to you and your forward motion is not when or how you become aware that your job is a dead-end job, but what you do once you get that memo!

You have choices. You can look around the organization for a meatier assignment. You can work at your dead-end job all day and use your nights and weekends to launch an independent consulting practice — something every working person should do.

You can start a stealth job search and leave the dead-end job in your rear view mirror, but first you have to become aware that your current job is not likely to get better.

Here are 10 signs you’re in a dead-end job.

1. Your role and your job description are fixed, without room to stretch. You are required to do your job the same way every day and you see no way to expand your contribution (or your own development).

2. Every idea you propose at work and every suggestion you make is met with the same reaction: “Thanks, but we’re not going to change anything.”

3. The role you fulfill for your employer is obviously not important to the people in charge.

4. There are more frustrated employees like you looking to move up in your organization than there are opportunities to do so.

5. For whatever reason — internal politics, inertia, your manager’s fear of your growing flame, or something else – you can see that your current job is the highest and most interesting position you’re going to get in your company.

6. You look around you and see that your organization doesn’t move people up or allow them to expand their roles.

7. Your manager gives you the work he or she doesn’t want to do. You are essentially an on-call special projects person. If that’s not what you want to be, then you’re in a dead-end situation.

8. When you talk with your manager about your professional growth and development, he or she doesn’t listen and doesn’t care.

9. People come and go in your organization all the time. The leaders have accepted the fact that the company is a revolving door.

10. When you envision yourself working at your current job one year from now, you don’t see anything changing.

Most of us will get stuck in a dead-end job at some point if it hasn’t happened to us already. There is a silver lining to a dead-end job. Once you get the knock on the head that says, “You can do better than this!” you have time to plan.

You can do your job every day and save your mental and emotional energy for your next step, whether it’s a sideline consulting business or a quiet job search. You can use that time to think about what you want to do next, and to re-energize your network.

Here are the steps to take once it hits you that your current job won’t move your career forward any further than it already has:

1. Get a journal and write in it every day or every couple of days. Write about your feelings about your job. Write about what you’d like to do next in your career.

2. Pull out your resume and add to it whatever shards or fragments of good results you’ve been able to squeeze out of your current assignment. They are there — you may just have to dig for them! You can claim a great idea on your resume if you researched and proposed the idea, even if your current employer didn’t go forward with it. It’s still a feather in your cap!

3. Make a list of ten people you already know whom you haven’t seen in a while, and send invitations to all ten of them to set up coffee or lunch meetings. Re-mobilizing your network will give you energy and motivation that your dead-end job undoubtedly sucks out of you.

4. Start browsing job ads to see what kinds of people other local employers are looking for.

5. Think about the types of Business Pain you solve in your work, or could solve in a new job. Your ability to spot and solve Business Pain is your power!

6. Get a consulting business card. You are a consultant now! Give your consulting business card to new people you meet and the friends and contacts you get together with as you re-energize your network.

7. Give up or back off on your efforts to get your current boss and the other managers in your shop to wake up and take steps on the good ideas you’ve been proposing to no avail. Use your energy in a more productive way, to advance your own career and mission!

Working in a dead-end job can feel hopeless and depressing, but it is only hopeless and depressing as long as you expect the job to be different than it is.

We only get frustrated with an asleep-at-the-wheel manager because we want them to do things they don’t want to do or we want them to be a different person than they actually are.

The minute you accept reality and say, “OK, my boss is not going to change — that’s fine. What difference does it make to me? My boss is on his path. I’m on my path. My path leads me up an out of here. It’s time to get going!” your life and your work both get easier.

A dead-end job doesn’t spell the end of your career advancement. It’s just a fork in the road. The earlier in your life you learn to spot the signs of a backwater assignment, the better for you in the long term!

Liz Ryan is the CEO and founder of Human Workplace. Follow her on Twitter and read the rest of her Forbes.com columns here.

 

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