Relaunch Your Career

As with finding out whether your organisation is at risk, working out whether your own specific job role is at risk may simply be a matter of opening your eyes to factors that are all around you.  Here are six key things to ask yourself or find out about:

• Compared to a year ago, how many people are employed doing the job role that you do?
• On an average day, how busy are you? Do new projects and pieces of work come in as often as they did?
• If overtime used to be a feature of your job, is overtime still available?
• Have you recently been offered retraining, or a different kind of job?
• How long has it been since someone was recruited to do the same or a similar job to yours?
• Check out the ‘jobs’ section of your organisation’s web site. What types of vacancies are being advertised? Is the company still looking for people with skills like yours and at your level?

If the needs of your company or its customers are changing, it’s quite possible that the skills you have are no longer the skills your company needs.

It is worth checking the recruitment pages in local newspapers or online recruitment sites – is anybody recruiting for people with your skills? It may be that there are better-paid and more fulfilling opportunities with other companies. And, if there aren’t, tough as it may be to find out, you are better knowing if demand for your skills is falling so that you can make plans.