Reinvigorating Your Career

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development  

The idea for this article had nothing to do with project management. I was talking to someone that I have known for years (who is not a PM) and he told me that he was feeling as though he wasn’t in charge of his career. Instead, he felt that he was stuck in a rut that he was unable to get out of. His employer was happy with the work that he was doing, and he didn’t think that they felt that there were any issues. However, he felt “demotivated” that work that he had previously enjoyed was now a chore and he was just counting the hours until 5 p.m.--and the days until Friday.

Project managers can find themselves in similar situations just as easily, so in this article I want to look at how we can recognize when we are starting to enter that rut and how we can turn things around.

Recognize the symptoms
We all have bad days, and some weeks have a lot of them! That’s not the same as getting to the point where we feel disengaged from our work. At the risk of stating the obvious, the first thing that you need to do is recognize when you have reached the point of being stuck in a job. When you are deep in the rut it’s obvious, but it’s important to recognize the signs before that point; just like project issues, the sooner you spot them the easier they are to solve.

As project managers, we are trained to be sensitive to the …

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