Brave career moves...

For years the view was the longer you stayed within a company the more attractive you were to potential new employers. You were seen as reliable and you must have been good at your job to have stayed somewhere for so long, right?

It feels like that viewpoint has flipped 180 degrees. With technology advancing so quickly it appears to have also had an impact on how quickly people change jobs too and the tenure in a company is no longer as important.

From a personal point of view, I previously worked for a company for 11 years and granted I held 5 different roles within that company due to performance and promotions but essentially I did the same job, just leading larger teams, territories and owning bigger budgets.

After a period of career coaching I realised that I wasn't being challenged in the right way and I also hadn't stepped out of my comfort zone in about 5 years. I could have stayed in that company or that role for another 10 years but that thought terrified me more than the alternative, which was to do break away and do something else.

I don't know if I would have come to that conclusion without the support of a career coach who helped me work through and understand what success meant to me, what I bring to a business and what my ambitions/goals were. After a long period of time in a role it's very easy to lose sight of these and more often than not, your definition of success is actually not your own but someone else's.

Now I wish I could say that career move was the job of my dreams and I'm still there having lots of success. That isn't the case but it was still one of the most successful career moves I've ever made.

It taught me that not every career move is going to be a great move.

And that's ok.

I still learned a lot, met some great people and ultimately it made me realise that it's ok to move on if a role isn't giving me what I need, regardless of how long I have worked there and how it might look on my CV.

If you find yourself working somewhere that you're not fulfilled my advice would be to have a chat with someone you trust in the recruitment industry, really understand what is important to you and then be brave enough to get out there and find it.

Life is too short not to!