How To Stay Engaged At Work While You Change Career

By Nisa Chitakasem

Posted in: How to make the change
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Feeling drained at your current job? Energy reserves low when you want to work on your career change in your free time? Here's how you can stay energised at your day job while you change career.

Re-engage With Colleagues

How well do you really know your colleagues? Do you know if you share similar interests with them outside of work?  Set up a team sports event or regular swimming / football / badminton / yoga session with people at work. Explore and make the most of perks such as a company gym, social clubs or training opportunities.

Learn About Your Organization as a Whole

How much do you know about the company or organization you are working for? What is its vision? What are its specific objectives? How do you and your team contribute to them? Where do you fit in and what else is going on around you? Find out about other departments in the organisation for inspiration. Perhaps you will discover ideas for your career change, and be able to network with people from other departments to find out more about work options.

Play to your strengths

Think about what you enjoy doing and what you are good at. By getting clearer about your areas of strengths you can work on re-adjusting your role to match these better. Think about which other areas you might want to get involved in where you’d be using and developing your skills and strengths further.

When you’re ready sit down with your boss and talk about how you can best contribute to your work, your team, and the organisation at large. Make sure that you are harnessing your strengths and experience so far. Find ways to contribute in a way that you can feel proud about it. Your boss might be able to suggest ways in which you can be more involved in areas you excel at.

Seek out areas that can be improved

In your team and across your organization there will be areas that could do with being improved. This could be in your area of work or in completely different areas such as CSR (Corporate social responsibility), health and safety, or perhaps internal communications. If there is an area you naturally care about (such as staff welfare or the environment) see if you can get involved in these areas at work.

Leave a comment below: If you are taking steps towards your career change and are as yet unable to leave your current work, how can you make your job more manageable and tolerable?

Nisa Chitakasem is the co-founder of UK-based career consultancy, Position Ignition Ltd. She specializes in helping people to achieve successful career changes and is the co-author of How to Get the Job You Want. Visit www.positionignition.com for more information or contact her at: enquiries@positionignition.com


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