3 Signs You Need a Career Transition Now

The only person that you can rely on making a lasting investment in your career is yourself. Not your boss, not your coworkers, and definitely not a corporation.

Don’t spend fifteen, ten, or even five years caught earning a year’s worth of meaningful work experience. Carefully evaluating your performance and priorities at work will help you decide when it might be time to move on to other opportunities.

Here are three signs that it might be time to take the next step in your career.

Career Transition Reason 1: Money

Your compensation should be based on the value you provide—know both your personal value and the market for your monetary value. If your pay is not aligned with your experience and growth in duties in your current position, you might consider it time to make a transition.

You’re likely losing money by not working somewhere else. With the average annual pay raise being 3 percent, companies demonstrate that a year’s worth of your own professional growth and personal investment accounts for give or take a 3 percent increase in pay. That is if your company offers an annual salary adjustment for the cost of living at all—fewer and fewer companies do.

According to Forbes, a person who changed jobs saw an average of anywhere from an 8-10 percent increase in salary—and for some up to a 20 percent increase.

Career Transition Reason 2: Experience

If you find yourself not being given the autonomy to create challenges in your role or you’re not achieving steady and measurable growth in skillset, experience, and opportunity—it might be time to make a transition.

By maintaining relationships from previous workplaces and establishing a reputation for quality work, taking on and rising to different challenges in different companies throughout your career establishes a proven track record to market yourself to potential employers.

Perhaps more importantly, it also helps you understand your own career aspirations. By working with different people and in varying capacities, you are given an opportunity to truly identify what kind of work and work environment gives you the most fulfillment—something that wouldn’t be possible without making a switch.

Career Transition Reason 3: Happiness & Engagement

There are—on average—2,087 work hours in a calendar year. What percentage of them were spent working on something that did not align with your personal and career aspirations?

Professionals feel that companies are most willing to invest in a new employee during the initial three-year period after being hired—meaning employees not only had more opportunities to learn and grow in that three-year period, but they also had someone at work who regularly encouraged and supported their development.

If you’re closing in on your three-year mark, assessing your level of satisfaction with your work, your growth at a company, and the opportunities for further personal development can be helpful in deciding whether it’s worth seriously considering other positions.