Career maintenance is the proactive practice of consistently monitoring, reflecting on, and adjusting your career life so you and your career stay versatile and adaptable in an ever-changing job market.
Our career lives require regular maintenance, just like other areas of our lives, including our physical, psychological, and relational health and well-being. Here are ten specific habits worth practicing regularly.
1. Keep expanding your skills
Lifelong learning is essential for staying adaptable, engaged, and curious throughout our careers. This doesn’t have to mean formal education. It can mean regular research, self-directed study, on-the-job skill development opportunities, professional development courses or certifications, or volunteer work. What matters is seeing our skills and capacities as continuously evolving and expanding, not static and not set at a particular stage in our lives.
2. Stay open to having more than one career
Having one career for life is increasingly the exception, not the rule. Accepting this reality and staying open to new and different opportunities throughout your working life keeps you creative, flexible, and attuned to changes in the world and the job market, as well as to the evolution of your interests, skills, and expertise.
3. Track movement and changes in your field(s) of interest
4. Accept changes
Accepting changes in your career isn’t passive resignation. Changes throughout our careers are inevitable, and the changes we experience can be welcome at times and disruptive at others. Working with, not against, the reality of change over the course of your career keeps you attentive to the contexts and drivers of change while keeping your creative and strategic muscles exercised and ready when needed.
5. Stay flexible in your career expectations
We all hold aspirations, expectations, and goals for our careers. Being open to adapting your expectations and aspirations when necessary doesn’t mean abandoning formal planning or goal setting. It means regularly reflecting on your experiences and assessing the viability of your expectations and aspirations in the current context, while maintaining enough flexibility to adjust as circumstances shift.
6. Stay attuned to and engaged with the wider world
Building and maintaining a career life requires looking beyond job postings and the job market. It means staying engaged with community and global issues that affect the job market, your profession, and the future of work. This keeps the routine maintenance of your career life attuned to the realities of the world rather than isolating it within your profession or role.
7. Participate and contribute intentionally
Whether in your current role or in the work and career objectives you’re building toward, intentional participation and contribution matter. It’s the difference between passively occupying a position and actively shaping it. Further, participation and contribution, whether on your work team, on a specific project, through mentoring, or through volunteering, keep us engaged and often fulfilled.
8. Develop a regular reflective practice
9. Pay attention to your well-being
10. Nurture areas of your life beyond work
Finally, deliberately nurturing other areas of your life beyond work fosters perspective-taking, helps you stay connected to a broader range of personal meaning, and keeps you active in “balancing” your life, all of which keep you healthy, mindful, engaged, more fulfilled, and better able to steer and adjust your career life.
Starting small
Career maintenance doesn’t require a complete overhaul. It requires ongoing practice.
Start small: Which of the ten habits listed resonates most with you at this stage of your career, and why? What could you try or practice within the realities of your work and life?
Start a career conversation. Contact Canvas Career Counselling at [email protected] for more information or to book a consultation.