Topnotch Consulting

For any career path, there are many choices to make. Sometimes, a wrong career choice can lead to a huge price to pay later in life. Our career path is like an unreadable game with extremely low fault tolerance. So, for everyone in the workplace, it is necessary to check whether your career has shown some alarming signs at regular intervals. This is like regular medical examinations. Timely detection and changes can ensure that you have a healthy and sustainable career. 1. Taking too long to determine a career path After graduation, many people didn’t spend adequate time to consider what they wanted to do, instead, they kept trying different professions. They gave up on those jobs after a short period of time for reasons such as “boring repetitive work” or “no developmental opportunities”. Over time, they found that they weren’t skilled for anything. Different occupations are the product of the social division of labour. It is this division of labour that allows different people to focus on different fields, improve the efficiency of social production, and greatly reduce the cost of obtaining services. Therefore, each profession has its own characteristics and barriers. Such characteristics and barriers determine that employees need a certain period of accumulation before they can achieve a breakthrough in their profession. When a person first enters the workplace, it’s inevitable to make several choices. However, this choice shouldn’t take too long to make. If you do not determine your career path for a long time, it is like a marathon where everyone else is warming up and getting ready to start, and you are still looking for shoes, it will be difficult to catch up in time. 2. The chosen industry is a sinking industry Over time and due to the development of technology, many industries have gradually started to decline. The career development of any person is bound to be influenced by the general trend of the industry. Choosing a rising industry for yourself is equal to helping your career develop smoothly. If your industry is a ‘sunset’ industry, once realised, you should immediately start preparing for a career change. Although the process of career change is deemed difficult, but it is better to fight than to “wait for death”. 3. Having the right career path but not being willing to progress in it Many people are pursuing a comfortable life, not the challenge of a career. Everyone has the right to choose their own lives, and this is understandable. However, I must remind you of the cruelty of the workplace. Everyone in the workplace needs to follow the “steps” at a pace. For instance, the junior lawyers responsibility is to work on cases under the supervision of senior lawyers. After 3 years, they will need to progress to a more senior role such as associate. Their responsibility at this time is to be able to undertake more complex cases, make decisions quite independently and possibly supervise a junior lawyer. Generally speaking, when they have 6 years working experience, they should be considered as experienced lawyers and are able to independently take on complex cases. You might ask, is it fine for a 6th year lawyer who only wants to earn an entry level salary is happy to continue working at the capacity of a junior lawyer? My answer is no. All companies want their employees to continue to grow, because in the process of employee growth, the company can reduce labour costs. Therefore, many companies regularly clean up employees who have no growth potential. 4. Lacking the courage to change There is a huge contradiction in the workplace: the more a person gets, the harder it is to change. For many people who have “prosperous careers”, it will undoubtedly take great courage to make changes. To some extent, careful consideration and full investigation are necessary before the change, but once the trend is clear, the change must be made with more determination. With the Internet trend set in 2008 in China, a large number of elites had left their own companies to join Internet companies where they obtained good positions and continued their careers. For those who didn’t change under this trend, it became harder as the time went by. We witnessed the loss and helplessness of employees after Oracle layoffs.