Feeling stuck in your career? Start here
The number one question I get asked is some version of "I feel stuck, what should I do?"
It usually comes from someone smart and capable who's doing fine on paper, but has a nagging feeling they're in the wrong spot.
If that's you, here's the comforting news first: most people don't love what they do.
The tricky part is that "stuck" rarely has an obvious fix, so most people do one of two things. They stay put and hope it passes, or they jump to the next shiny job and end up feeling the same six months later.
The other thing I see a lot is people waiting for the right job listing to appear.
They scroll the job boards, hope something jumps out, and let whatever happens to be advertised that week become their reference point. That rarely leads anywhere great.
So here's a practical framework I come back to whenever someone tells me they're stuck. Whether a role is the right fit almost always comes down to four things, which I call PEGS.
Problem
Start with the problems that frustrate you, excite you or that you just can't stop thinking about.
The sweet spot is where your curiosity meets a need other people actually have.
When you care about the problem you're solving, the hard days get a lot easier, and when you don't, even the easy days drag.
Environment
Next, think about where you'd want to work on that problem.
A multinational, a startup, government, a consultancy, an investment firm or a not-for-profit can all tackle the same problem in completely different ways.
A few questions that help:
- Do you want mentorship and structure, or ownership and autonomy?
- Do you work best independently or with a tight team?
- Do you want to go broad or go deep?
- How comfortable are you with risk and things changing every week?
Company size often answers a lot of these for you. I had an itch to work in a big company early on, so I did, and I hated it.
Goals
Then get honest about what you actually want from your next role, and from your career more broadly.
Some common ones:
- Learn as much as possible
- Run your own business one day
- Earn a high salary
- Have a good work-life balance
- Work flexible hours
- Make a social impact
There's no right answer, but you do have to rank them. Your top goal for the next two years might look very different to your top goal for the next twenty, and that's completely fine.
A lot of people feel stuck simply because their job is delivering on a goal they no longer care about.
Skills
Finally, forget job titles for a second and think about the skills you'd actually be using day to day.
Map out the skills you have, then sort them by how much you enjoy using them. Then add the ones you want to build.
The best signal I know is work that feels like play. If there's a part of your job where you lose track of time, that's worth paying attention to.
Putting it together
Run your current role through all four.
Most of the time, being stuck isn't about everything being wrong. It's one or two of the four that are off, like the right problem in the wrong environment, or the right skills chasing the wrong goal.
That makes the fix a lot smaller than quitting and starting over. Sometimes it's a different team, a side project or a conversation with your manager, not a whole new career.
And when it is time for a bigger move, you'll know exactly what you're looking for instead of just running away from what you've got.
Instead of waiting for the right listing, you can go after the specific problems, environments and companies that fit your PEGS.
It makes your search a lot more targeted and strategic, and puts you far more in control of the outcome.
It's not a one-off
You're unlikely to have the perfect picture straight away, and that's fine.
Your goals will change, your skills will grow and the world will keep shifting around you. But just having it laid out in front of you, and coming back to it every so often, makes every decision after it a lot clearer.
The people I see thriving aren't the ones who picked the perfect path on day one. They're the ones who've gotten comfortable taking a beat and recalibrating, often, without treating it as a sign something has gone wrong.