What do you do if your career growth is stagnant despite innovative marketing operations?

Take time to reflect on your career goals, aspirations, and areas of interest within the field of marketing operations. Assess your skills, strengths, and weaknesses to identify areas for improvement and potential opportunities for growth.

Assessing skills is important, and suggest as a part of this process, it’s important to evaluate your deliverables. To remain relevant, it’s important to tweak, tear down and rebuild when necessary, or employ major changes that support your current stakeholders and their environment. If you find that some of your standard deliverables haven’t changed in a couple of years, that could be a warning sign. If you get in the habit of continuous evaluation, you have no choice but to stay up to date. If you are in tune and anticipate your stakeholders needs, they will notice.

Build and nurture your professional network within the marketing operations community through networking events, industry associations, and online forums. Connect with peers, thought leaders, and influencers in the field to exchange ideas, insights, and career opportunities.

Request feedback from your manager, colleagues, or mentors to gain insights into your performance, contributions, and areas for development. Actively seek constructive feedback on your innovative marketing operations initiatives and how they are perceived within the organization.

Agree with all perspectives mentioned. In addition, it’s important to ensure you are open to feedback and that it is welcomed. Ensure that the feedback you receive is specific so that you can action it. Feedback is an opportunity that can always be leveraged to improve and learn.

This option is only valid if you’ve done a few other things first. You should have shared your achievements appropriately with line management and with a wider network. This publicity should attract the right attention if the organisation you work for has correct talent identification processes. If you are identified as a talent then career progression should come with an appropriately discussed timeframe. If this doesn’t work for you, then exploring options is something to consider because if you’re great, then greater things await you somewhere else where your talents are recognised.

If you find that your current company does not place value on you as a top performer and this is limiting your growth potential, find a company that will. While staying may seem “safe”, it is not in your best interest long term. From my personal POV, changing companies was the best thing I ever did. You will experience different leadership and witness how problems are addressed, how challenges are tackled, how people are awarded, how they think about their customers, etc. It expands your mind and will make you a stronger leader.

Keep a positive attitude and remain resilient in the face of challenges or setbacks in your career journey. Stay persistent in pursuing your goals and aspirations in marketing operations, and continue to seek opportunities for growth and advancement, both within your current organization and beyond.