Who Determines Your Career Track?

Don’t leave it to your boss to evaluate your efforts and determine when and if you are ready to advance. If you’ve found your way in to a company you respect and can be proud of, you may have given in to the temptation to put your career path on auto-pilot, letting the business decide how you will grow and where you will go. Remember, though, that your boss is a limited person who does not know what you are truly capable of. He knows his experience, and perhaps has a philosophy on promotions, but only you know what are truly worth — and you only know this when you test your limits.

Take responsibility for finding your own opportunities. Don’t expect your business or anybody to recognize your talents or tell you what you are capable of. Most people are more intent on themselves and their own placement. You need to determine what you are capable of by imagining yourself in a greater role.

Ask around, and see what others like you have done. Listen for the success stories and imagine yourself taking on such a career track. There is no rulebook for what you can and cannot do, and just because you are criticized or praised at your current job doesn’t mean you must bow to that opinion. Perhaps in another environment, the assessment would be entirely different.

It becomes too easy to meld our mind to the groupthink that’s what’s good for the company is good for me. The company might use some streamlined formulas for success, a few sloganized policies, but ultimately they are looking to survive in an entirely different market than that which you as an individual are competing in. If you want to know what your experience can do for you in opening new opportunities and challenges, daydream a little about what you admire and could conceive yourself as doing. Develop an inner agency, a bit of fate in your own soul, that will lead you to forfeit your current job, if need be, for a more promising career track elsewhere.

Don’t wait on others to recognize you and promote you. It’s up to you to sell and promote yourself, and not to wait on the intelligence and ability of a busy boss to recognize you and praise you. You could lose years in frustration with such a tack. Nor should you let resentment build, but in all things be practical. What you want is what you want, and if you can’t get it here, than you will politely seek it elsewhere. That is the pragmatic approach, and it depends, finally, on being self-directed and autonomous.

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