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| Time Waits For No One... |
For consultants there should never be a situation where you are at one client for more than 18 months. Anything over that time frame has dimmed others' vision of your expert opinion and ability to be impartial about matters where you have had outside experience. It further embeds you into the corporate culture of the client - the politics, the seating arrangements, the promotions and the like. Even worse if you have been at a client for more than 2 - 3 years, you are really out of touch with new processes, technology improvements, and future landscapes. I don't care how much you read Gartner and all the other online or print magazines. Unless you are experiencing it, you are not in it. You are just out of touch.
Employees that are still counting on pensions and retirement plans have hopefully decreased since the fall of Enron in 2001 and the start of the last US tumultuous economy in 2007. There is the means to an end with a paycheck in a job but even employees need to take charge of their career. A career is the path set to pursue your passions. In order to make it work for you, you have to work for it. This means volunteering for tasks outside of the normal job description, being the go-to person when other people on the team are struggling and not performing, or rolling up the sleeves and getting hands-on if you are in a management role. This sets you apart from the rest by increasing the value when being reviewed for layoff time and, more importantly, raises the stakes and the salary when obtaining employment somewhere else.
Evaluate where you are professionally and identify whether or not you have met or exceeded your 1, 5, 10, and even 15 year goals. Chances are if you have not met them, you either did not set the goal or became complacent and stayed too long. If learning more and stretching to become better is part of your makeup, take the actions to make a change. Too long is long enough!
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