How to Tell If Your Career is Stalled

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By Althea DeBrule
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Tell If Your Career is Stalled

Throughout your work life there will be various checkpoints or opportunities to examine whether or not you are on the correct career path. These routine safeguards and inspections will reveal breakdowns and weaknesses, and give you a chance to tweak and make career adjustments along the way. Have you stopped or stalled out on your career path? To determine if this has happened, consider these 10 statements.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Block of uninterrupted time to honestly evaluate your career
Notebook and pen

Step 1

You view your career as a dead-end that must be endured.
Step 2

You believe that the only good thing about your job is that it pays the bills.
Step 3

You’re frustrated with doing the same thing over and over.
Step 4

You expected more from a career, but just don’t seem to be moving forward.
Step 5

You feel your career has come to a screeching halt and you’re at a standstill.
Step 6

Your personal relationships are suffering because of frustration on the job.
Step 7

You’ve placed your lifetime dreams and ambitions on the back burner and are now bogged down in job-related minutia and trivia.
Step 8

You really care about your work, your career and personal development; but for every step you move forward, you seem to take two backwards. You're just stuck.
Step 9

You feel you’ve reached a plateau in career progression and are concerned that you’ve lost your “competitive edge”.
Step 10

You’ve noticed subtle changes in how you are treated in team meetings. Your opinions and insight are disregarded and you are frequently left out of the communication loop.

Tips & Warnings

If you checked 6 or more of these statements, it just may be that your career is stalled. Use the resources below to help you get unstuck.
Print this article and use it for periodic evaluation of your career.
If your career has stalled, don’t panic. Instead, make a concerted effort to thoroughly identify and evaluate what you can do to put it back on track.

Resources