Reasons Career Change Business Apprentice Bottom Line Manager Success Change
If you feel the work you do for your employer is in line with your career aspirations, there is no reason to make a career change. However, if, during the latest round of changes, threatened redundancies and reorganisations, you feel squashed into a role that is more convenient to the company than to you, it could be time to consider other options of employment.
Working at the same company for a number of years has the advantages of job security and a build-up of valuable experience in the same field of work, but the downside is that the job so insulates you from the outside world that you end up being totally dependant on the company.
One of the advantages of getting older is that you become more objective. Priorities change just enough to make you stop to think about where your job is taking you. When younger, you felt an insatiable drive to get to the top, but now experience has taught that there are issues that are far more important than self-promotion and material gain.
Companies change to meet the challenges of the marketplace and the demands of shareholders. Some of those changes directly affect the job you do. In an effort to cut costs, the company may have reduced the workforce and simply shared what work was done among the remaining staff. Now the job becomes a mad race to get through the workload. Being able to concentrate on the details of the job as it was is no longer possible. The company has changed to the point that you now feel it is a plant to make money as cheaply as possible - not what you look for in a satisfying career. Time to think about a change?
After few years in the same career, you accumulate particular skills and abilities and develop an extra sense that enables you to sniff out solutions to problems and anticipate what comes next. In today's fast-changing world, the need for a great number of skills is being lost to technology. Nowhere are these changes more felt than where workers are redeployed in areas of work that may or may not be as interesting.
Companies are always pushing for better productivity. The focus on the bottom line takes attention away from the 'lines' further up the page on the balance sheet. Bringing in bright new talent to boost a lacklustre 3 month period is thought to be the answer to everything. Now, instead of just one problem, there are two. One is the poor performance, the second is the change of dynamics in the office as everyone has to relate to the 'new broom' that imagines there is dust everywhere that needs sweeping!
Watching a few episodes of The Apprentice will demonstrate that the drive to win can drown out an awful lot of common sense. Some of these contestants simply gamble with their own credibility, putting all their trust in a mad idea that viewers the world over find irritating. Bluffing, faking, blowing one's own trumpet, seems to be what qualifies these guys for getting onto the program. In the real world, importing such a candidate to turn around a flagging department is no guarantee of short-term success. For the staff already in place, being inflicted with such a 'manager' will find at least some of them looking for alternative employment. Understandably so!
If you look for any kind of fulfilment from your career, you will find changes that restrict your being able to function at your best, ever more difficult to manage. To a certain point, you may try to accommodate the change, beyond that point, you will be looking for work elsewhere. The truth is that in a world that changes so fast, the list of reasons to make a career change is growing all the time. The hope is that the list of options grows at a similar rate!
