With all the anxiety and uncertainty this year, most of us have had to pause, hunker down, and re-evaluate everything, including our goals and expectations. Many of us have found our carefully-laid career paths unexpectedly blocked, while others have struggled with unpredictably despite all of our best efforts to this point.
When things don’t go as planned, we often feel stuck and with so much uncertainty, afraid to consider changes to our stable situations – we’ve already had to work harder than ever this year to navigate the ‘new normal’, evolving our technologies, processes and perspectives along the way; but with this comes the need to re-evaluate the ways in which our jobs, employers, and company cultures are able to support our changing lives. When our paths shift, perhaps our destination needs to change as well.
There is a big difference between changing jobs and making strategic career moves. Job changes tend to be reactionary but making a strategic career move means that you are planning your career path and taking steps to move ahead. A September 2020 study from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team shows that promotions are down 40% this year. Strategic career moves are perhaps more important now than ever in this environment to achieve your goals and advance you career trajectory.
Have you thought about your talents and which areas you would like to increase your skills or broaden your experience? What type of company culture is important for you? Do you want to manage a team? Do you know where you want to be in five or even ten years from now?
Staying with the same company for ten or more years can often result in a slower advancement, stagnant compensation, and decreased in enthusiasm for your job. But making defined strategic career moves every three to four years can help you to advance your career, boost your experience, and increase your compensation.
Here are some examples of positive, strategic motivations for career moves:
- The opportunity to advance in terms of title, increased responsibilities, increased visibility, and/or better reporting structure.
- The ability to work on different therapeutic areas, different types of molecules, or programs in different phases of development.
- Switching from a large company to a small organization or startup (or vice versa) to get exposure to different company cultures and ways of doing things.
- Getting experience managing a team of direct reports versus being an individual contributor.
- The opportunity to get international or global experience, rather than just working with US projects.
- The ability to lead a NDA or BLA and get a program approved.
- The opportunity to live and work in another part of the country or another part of the world.
Gaining more experience and broadening your skills on your resume will make you more marketable and appealing to employers. But it is important to ensure that each career move is carefully thought out and that there is value beyond just a pay raise. Although these are uncertain times, there is an incredible opportunity to find valuable, exciting, challenging new contexts we would have never considered if not for these circumstances.
Dennis Partners would be glad to speak with you about your career goals and how we can help you to achieve them through some well-planned strategic moves.
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