Select Page

Setting your career on Employment auto-pilot


You got a new job. In the first few months, you struggled to prove yourself by working hard and going above and beyond. After all those over times, fire-fighting and volunteering everyone finally recognized you as a good team player, rock-star and a versatile genius. Now what? You slowly get settled in the comfort zone that you created for yourself. You keep working on similar tasks at work again and again. You already know what obstacles you might face as you have done that quite a few times earlier. The work that was challenging in the beginning is not the same anymore, you can do it blindfolded now. Everyone in your organization address you as an expert or a go-to person for such and such task. Your work is getting monotonous, but little do you care. Because you are getting enough recognition for your efforts and upper management is happy with what you are doing. Everything is going fine, right? Wrong.

Suddenly, there is a huge re-org or budget cut and the upper management decided to lay-off some folks. And unfortunately, you are likely to be on the list of lay-offs, why? Because you have not proved to be worth-while for the organization as you have not improved your skills all these years. Although, you are good at what you do but you end up losing your job because of not keeping up with the technology advancements.

Now you wake up from your dreamland and get ready to dive into the job market. But you lack new skills. Recruiters in your field are asking for new technologies that you have only heard of but do not have hands-on experience. There is no point in learning them now as you have very little time left.

Also, you have lost all your previous contacts while you were busy working on the monotonous tasks in your present organization. You login into your LinkedIn profile after what seems to be a decade and start sending connection requests to your previous colleagues and very few people accept them as they do not recall you anymore.

This happens a lot in all organizations especially in IT as the technology advancement is rapidly growing in IT. Hence, as a professional we should always be ready to pursue new opportunities.

Why do we have to act only at the time of crisis? Why can’t we do this earlier while we are on the job and at a relatively lesser risk? Why do we have to get so busy working for the organization that eventually has the power to let us go, while not focusing on our own future?

The reality is we have been so busy satisfying our employers that we lost track of what our goals are, and we never came up with a Plan B if anything goes terribly wrong.

What if I tell you, there is a way to handle these inevitable situations in a very subtle way. Just by incorporating some simple habits in our daily life, we will be able to set our career on Employment Auto-Pilot. It is a term that I came up with, which means we never have to thoroughly look for a new project or a job at the time of crisis anymore. Jobs should come looking for us. Employers should come searching for us. And all this can be achieved by spending only a fraction of time every day. Our expertise should be visible all throughout our career and we always get to choose the best job from multiple options.

There are certain habits, if we inculcate these habits into our daily life, it will certainly help our career and eventually puts it on an Employment Auto-Pilot. Brace yourself, we are quickly going to dive into the habits now.

Habit 1: Engage on LinkedIn

Habit 2: Write down your accomplishments daily/weekly

Habit 3: Learn new skills using videos

Habit 4: Work towards a certification

Habit 5: Get yourself ready for an interview physically and mentally