How to Tear Down Career Walls and Get Unstuck
PATHS to get unstuck
Happy Friday everyone!
There have been several points in my career when I’ve ‘hit a wall’, as they say. These were times when I felt stuck, stagnant and unsure about where my career was going.
It’s extremely frustrating if you find yourself in such situations but, over the years, I've learned that hitting a wall can turn out to be a blessing. In hindsight, I think about these walls as detours, or signals to realign and reflect.
I was reflecting on those experiences and thinking about how I dealt with them. Having revisited the steps I took, I’ve realised that I was, subconsciously, following a framework.
I, now, call it the ‘PATHS framework for getting unstuck’ and, in this piece, I would like to share it with you.
I’ve written about this briefly before but, when I was at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), my role was within what they called the Knowledge Team (KT). While on the Consulting side, the career model was high growth - high risk, KT followed a low growth - low risk model.
I wanted something in between the two and realised, within a couple of years, that the role wasn’t going to provide me with the growth platform that I wanted. As I had been there for some time, I could look a few years ahead and get a sense of what my seniors were up to. They were amazing people but their roles didn’t appeal to me.
In this piece, I’ll share how I applied the PATHS framework in that situation.
P - Pause and Reflect:
As a first step, I decided to sit back and take stock of where things stood for me. I assessed my situation objectively and realised that:
I wasn’t going to get what I wanted through my existing role so I had to find another job either internally at BCG or somewhere else.
I had developed a good network, while at BCG, and that was something I could leverage but it wasn’t going to be easy.
Within BCG, KT is a bit of a unique role and not many companies understand it on a comprehensive level so it was a challenge to sell myself to the market.
A - Assess and Adjust:
Having reflected on where things stood for me, I wanted to develop an approach to navigate through the challenge at hand. I wasn’t going to quit my job with nothing in hand so….this had to be a project running on the side. I, thus, decided to:
Seek feedback from some of my mentors and colleagues (especially ex colleagues who had moved on) to get a sense of how they were thinking about their career trajectories and what I could learn.
Evaluate my skills and identify areas where I had to up-skill.
Adjust my strategies and expectations based on the feedback I got and the self-evaluation that I did.
T - Targeted Skill Enhancement:
Following on from the second bullet in ‘A’, I went about planning the skill enhancement part. Essentially, this meant that I had to:
Identify skill gaps in my profile and get a sense of areas where I needed to develop additional expertise.
Take up targeted trainings or courses to enhance my skill set. For instance, I took a courses in Sales Operations and Enablement to stand out from a Business Operations perspective.
Focus on acquiring skills that were relevant from the perspective of roles that I would be pursuing. In this case, I tried to put myself out there within BCG. I got involved with projects that were focused on making operational improvements for clients. It helped position myself as a process improvement expert and came in handy when applying for roles overall.
H - Harness Networking:
Networking is exceptionally important when navigating career moves. It may or may not land you your next gig immediately but it’s still great to get in contact with people you can have an exchange of ideas with. So I set out to:
Build and leverage professional relationships both within and outside BCG. I kicked off several dialogues through emails or Linkedin messages. Many didn’t respond but some did and, well, that was enough.
Attend networking events (IRL or online) to expand my network. This helped me a lot as, I landed several interviews through referrals from contacts I made through such events.
S - Set SMART Goals:
Ultimately, it’s all about where you want to get i.e. your north star. You might say that your goal is to land a job and that’s fine but if that’s your north star, you need to be able to track your progress towards it. Also, it still needs to be pinned down what exactly that job should entail. That’s where the SMART acronym comes in, as the image shows. However, I wanted a detailed plan for myself as well so, I had to:
Mark out a trackable north star e.g. a new BizOps role at senior management level within a year that pays xx per month.
Break down the north star into smaller daily/weekly goals e.g. submitting 10 job applications per week.
Track progress towards the goals and adjust them as needed. I had a spreadsheet that I used to track applications, interviews. There were weeks when I wasn’t able to keep up but even that was good data.
All in all, taking a structured approach to get unstuck is very important. The PATHS framework may make things look simple but, if you’ve ever had to make a big career transition, you would know that it’s far from simple. The idea behind this framework isn’t to be the be all end all but to help with navigating through the challenge of getting over career roadblocks. There will, of course, be setbacks and disappointments along the way, as there were in my case. Having an approach, at least for me, helps me digest those setbacks better.
I’ve shared the example of how I got over the challenge I was facing at BCG but, as I mentioned earlier, I feel like I’ve applied the PATHS framework at various other points in my career as well.
Have you used any frameworks when you’ve been stuck? What do you think of the PATHS framework? Any other observations? I’d love your feedback in the comments or through a Restack.
Thanks for reading!
Thank you so much @CareerJig ! Glad you found it useful.
Great article, PATHS is definitely useful, especially networking and playing the long game in that. Establishing relationships that fuel your learning, and help you understand what you may want to do is key and how you can help others before you ask for help.