Career Development: Steep Or Rather Flat?

Career Development: Steep Or Rather Flat?

Who doesn’t dream of a steep career progression? If you are looking for your first job, then you will certainly have concrete ideas about what this job should look like. A meaningful job, great colleagues, a good starting salary and a career development that only goes upwards. If you’ve already been working for ten years, you’ll probably wonder what happened to these ideas. In the rarest of cases, everything has gone in a straight line. Career development can have ups and downs.

At The Beginning Of The Career Development Is The First Job

When you start your career, you want to get the best of all the jobs right away. A job with great pay, great colleagues and great opportunities for advancement. But a healthy realism about career development often falls by the wayside. It’s not for nothing that the question many recruiters ask during a job interview is “Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?” Of course, the point of the question is to elicit something from the applicant. Is he ambitious? What aspirations does he bring to the table? In combination with other questions, it attempts to determine what potential lies behind the candidate. The question is not, “Where do you see yourself in 18 months or two years?” A new employee represents an investment for any company. Very often, it takes some time for a newcomer to become familiar with complex issues and structures. And in large corporations in particular, rapid career development is one thing.

What Are The Career Developments?

An example company: Five employees form a relatively small organizational unit. The group has one boss. Four groups form a department with one department head. Three departments form a segment with a segment head. The company consists of four segments, with one CEO. Have you done the math? 240 ordinary employees, 48 group leaders, 12 department leaders, four segment leaders and one CEO. That’s just an example, but there are 65 managers in the company, which is about 20% of the workforce.

You don’t have to have studied mathematics to understand that a so-called management career (vertical career) is not possible for every new employee. But the question is, is such a classically conceived career development even right for everyone? There are many development opportunities. Many people tend to see a professionally demanding job as an opportunity for personal fulfillment. A scientist on the research front, a doctor with empathy for her patients, a product developer in the IT sector – these can be fulfilling tasks. People who have become experts over the years and who may even pass on this knowledge to colleagues have also developed a career, a so-called horizontal career. Or people with organizational talent find themselves in a project management career. Managing projects means: people management without authority to issue directives. For many, this is a fine art. How do you motivate a large team to achieve a common goal without getting the club out? As you can see, career development can have many faces.

Career Development In Reality, Sometimes It Stalls

If you start your first job with enthusiasm, you may quickly become disillusioned because many things are different from what you had imagined. Mind you, it can be like that, but it doesn’t have to be. Maybe you even make a promising career step relatively quickly and then your career development stagnates. You are unsure how to continue your journey. Should you change companies, are you waiting for a better boss, do you feel secure in your job and don’t want to risk anything? Make one thing clear to yourself: career development means change, standing still is not development. If standing still is okay for you, then fine. But if something inside you tells you that this can’t be it yet, then you have to become active.

What To Do To Advance Your Career?

You can plan your career development. You can approach career planning strategically, you can seek advice or you can use certain tools to orient yourself. For example, slected’s digital career coach is one such tool that you can use to first define your personal career goals. What do your dream job profile and the corresponding salary look like? The digital career coach shows you options for action and determines your true, current market value. With the digital career coach, you can define steps that can give your career development a significant boost.