2 Ways to Know If You've Hit Your Career Ceiling

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How you feel about your job is obviously an important indication. The other is whether your company encourages you to learn skills that will keep you — and the company — relevant. Acuff's latest book is titled "Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work and Never Get Stuck" (http://goo.gl/UTha27).

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Transcript - A career ceiling is when you get stuck and it can happen a couple of different ways. It can be the 70 percent of Americans who according to Gallup don’t like their jobs but don’t do anything about it. They’ve just kind of accepted that a job is just a job and this is what I do for the rest of my life. We eat at TGI Friday’s, not TGI Monday’s for a reason. The Office was a popular show for a reason. Delbert books sold a lot for a reason because we get stuck. For me that was climbing to the top of a career ladder and maybe that’s something you relate to. I was 32 years old and I worked at AutoTrader and I had a great job but I was a senior content designer and there was no super-duper senior content designer position above that. I had come to the end of that ladder and at 32 that was overwhelming to think okay, my career ball has already stopped rolling and this is where I am. Companies get stuck too. They hit ceilings. I read a great article in The New York Times that asked why didn’t Kodak create Instagram. Why didn’t Polaroid create Instagram? Of all the people that should have understood our love affair with photography why did they miss it and what happens for a company is that you start with innovation and risk.

But then when things go well you tend to move from innovation mode to protection mode. And you start to protect the things you’ve already built so nobody can walk in to Kodak and say I have an idea for an app. You know, it won’t make any money but at the end of two years it’ll be worth a billion dollars. So they got stuck and industries get stuck too. I spoke to a group of orthodontists and to be an amazing orthodontist right now you have to be good at social media, email marketing and running a business. Do you know what they don’t teach at orthodontic school? Social media, email marketing and running a business. So they have a choice to get unstuck. And the key when you hit a career ceiling is to work on your skills. It’s impossible to get stuck somewhere old if you keep learning something new. And that’s the concept of a ceiling.

What are some signs you’ve hit a career ceiling? Yeah, what are some signs you’ve hit a career ceiling? The sense of just repetition over and over again. You know you’ve hit a ceiling when you feel Monday on Sunday. When it’s Sunday at noon and you could already feel Monday, that Monday’s creeping into your weekend. And you know you’ve hit a ceiling where you have a career that owns your weekdays and haunts your weekends. And you see that happen a lot where people can’t even really enjoy vacation. If you’ve ever had that feeling where you go on a weeklong vacation and right at the last day you finally have that sense of okay, I can do this. And the next day your vacation is over and you go back to work and you stand wistfully in the break room and kind of look out the window with a sad cup of coffee and think I was free once and it was yesterday. You know when you’ve hit a ceiling. Or you’re not growing. Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/aKFQPb