Your #Career : Do You Need A New Job in 2016? This One Question Will Tell You…So here is the Question. Where is your Career on the Curve?

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Should you stay in your current job, or is it time to move? You will have various ways of dealing with this question, but let me suggest one concept that you may have missed. Or if you are thinking of it, you may not have realised its full ramifications. I’m going to ask you a very pointed question here. The answers might transform your plans for the coming year.

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The concept is  the simple S-curve. If you have studied marketing, you will recognise it immediately as the product lifecycle, but it applies to everything – businesses, careers, musical genres, empires…

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For a product the stages are introduction-growth-maturity-decline. For a career the stages can be characterised as:

    1. Learning the job – excitement, disorientation, growth;
    2. Proving yourself – producing results, acquiring mastery;
    3. Mastery – quite effortless competence;
    4. Decline – boredom, staleness, beyond your sell-by date.

So here is the question. Where is your career on the curve? How much have you learned in the past year, compared to how much you learned in the first year? What is your level of excitement, relative to past years? If you are still growing, that’s good. It’s probably worth staying, unless there’s something wrong with the organisation. It’s the mastery phase that is dangerous.

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The feeling that you have mastered your job is, for most of us, very pleasant. We feel comfortable, competent, in control (but see my previous post!). Life is good. But here’s the bad news. If you have reached this point, the rot is already setting in. Peak mastery is in fact the beginning of decline. And from this follows something very important; just when you feel on top of things is the moment you need to be looking for the next step. This seems counterintuitive, but think for a moment and you will see why it makes sense.

When is the best time to be looking for a new job? Is it when you are at the top of your powers? Still energised about the job you are doing, still performing strongly, still confident? Or is it better to be looking when you are starting to fade, getting a little bored, maybe not giving of your best, starting to worry? Put that way, it’s obvious, but it is so easy to miss. So often, we don’t start to plan the next move until we start to feel bored or uncomfortable where we are. Then, given the inevitable delays in getting our ideas together and the time waiting for the right thing to come up, we are into the period of decline. Trust me on this – it’s a mistake I’ve made. Probably one of my biggest mistakes.

If this little piece of productive paranoia seems an unwelcome intrusion in the season of peace and goodwill, please believe it’s well intentioned. If it does make you feel uncomfortable, that probably means there’s something you need to attend to as soon as you are back at work.

Forbes.com | December 31, 2015 | Alastair Dryburgh