3 Keys To Staying Relevant In Your Career

Once you’ve settled into your career of choice, it can be very easy to rest on your laurels and focus mainly on the job at hand. There’s nothing wrong with this if you do your job well, but what happens when you’re a couple of decades into your field, and you see new innovations and techniques coming your way that could quickly render you irrelevant?

I had this moment of reckoning with myself a couple of years ago as I rounded the corner to my 40th birthday. I had spent the last five years in marketing, and I could feel I was ‘aging - out’ as Gen Z started to change the game as far as how we receive and process information. I wasn’t ready to be put out to pasture just yet, so I decided to do something about it.

Here’s a list of three things I did to rejuvenate my mindset and my career:

Listen to the youth with your ear to the streets

The children are the future. It’s not cliche. They really are. Too many times as we get older we think of their opinions and tastes as not worthy of our time and consideration. So I downloaded Tik Tok and immersed myself in the platform. I also started listening to more Top 40 music and consuming younger media. You know what? The kids are alright! Even if it ends up not being your cup of tea, it will refresh how you relate to the world through the way you communicate and view up and coming trends, especially if you lived in the era they are emulating. What are the similarities and the differences? It’s a breath of fresh air that creates more possibilities for you than yelling at them to get off your lawn will.

Get continuing education and sharpen your existing skills

As we get more comfortable in our lives and careers when we mature, we also get stuck in our current education level. We tend to be in denial that your basic education in your field was probably more than twenty years ago, and perhaps having another look isn’t the worst thing for you. Also, when you do the same thing day in and day out, you tend to take for granted that your arsenal of skills are as strong as they’ve always been. You don’t have to enroll in expensive courses to revitalize your skill set. There are tons of free and inexpensive courses available online in just about any topic, even from Ivy League schools! Go ahead and carve out half an hour a day to listen, watch, and read!

Do Not Settle For Staying In A Bad Work Culture

With age and experience comes choice. If you are in an environment that makes you miserable, or just a toxic company culture in general, give yourself permission to move on. Your parents may have stayed at the same company for 35 years a generation ago, but there’s no gold watch at the end of the rainbow for that kind of loyalty in this day and age now. Of course there are exceptions to this, especially if you’re close to being fully vested in a government job, but for the most part your investment in any company, like retirement funds, can be moved somewhere else. The mental and emotional toll can hold you back a lot more than you think. Start putting an exit strategy together today so you can not only do the job you love, but do it in an environment where you are valued. Life is simply too short to suffer in silence for a paycheck.

Remember, you control your own destiny in your career, and complacency equals stagnancy. Keep moving, keep growing, and good things will be on their way!