The moment that your progress has stopped.
It hits you one day as you are sitting at your desk, maybe thinking, maybe working. You get an itch to look up a friend or co-worker - given the Internet, it is not all that difficult these days. You go to the social job-media site and look up one person, then you flip to another. You keep looking at them and their careers and then it comes to you in a flash of light: you are stuck. Stopped. Mired in your career at the place you are, perhaps never to move out.
You realize that those higher in the food chain have moved on almost unaffected by events - and in fact, may be doing better than ever. Those that you knew have gone on in their own careers for the most part, slowly climbing the ladder of industry to your equivalent level or beyond.
And yet you have stayed where you are, frozen in time like a fossil.
I know, I know. I hear your comment already: "It does not matter. Everyone is different and besides, you can tell nothing about a person's life simply by looking on a website. People talk themselves up all the time." And that is true, of course. People seldom post their actual selves in a forum that really reveals what is going on their lives and titles and companies are as fluid an interpreted as running water.
But herein lies my concern and my issue: at some point a hard eyed look at the situation must be taken. Just because not everything changes does not mean that change never occurs. And if change in others occurs but it does not for you, notice must be taken.
For me, this is my reality: I have held the same title for 12 years, half of those at my current employer. While colleagues and friends have changed, moved, and been promoted I have been in place, a barnacle on the reef as the ocean goes in and out. The calls I have had are seldom or never for steps up but rather lateral moves or even different positions.
In other words, I feel stuck.
And time is not one's friend at this point. The longer one stays, the more one appears to have maxed out their limit - after all, if one was actually skilled one would have moved up long ago. There must be something wrong with one, some reason that the move up has never happened.
And you are not precisely young enough to be just out of college either.
How does this end? I am truly not sure. But there is a sense that I am face-planted against a ceiling I cannot see but is definitively there, a ceiling that refuses to yield but I am continually compressed against.
Where is the hammer I need to break through?
Hmmm if one was skilled eh? Well there are only so many positions and less as you go up. Under todays rules you are even less likely to be able to progress since you are not Female or a minority (I assume lol for all I know you could a minority I never asked).
ReplyDeleteProgress today means squat. Except maybe it means you know how to tow the multi-cult propaganda line and fit one of their special classes.
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ReplyDeleteThat's the problem Preppy - the positions do thin out as you move up the ladder. I think in my case I have been through the change of an industry where it has become more professionalized (they now offer a specific degree) and I am old school (self-taught up through the ranks).
ReplyDeleteI guess what saddens me is that I have believed for most of my work life in meritocracy, which scarcely seems to be the case anymore.
I should probably clarify too that at least for what I do know and have done, the business is largely bias free in terms of the usually items. And, I have found it to be like any other business: the good ones are always in demand (maybe I am not a good one then), while the mediocre fight for scraps. It seems to be a great deal more dependent on who you know and what your CV says (as opposed to what you may have done).
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