Beware the Mid-Career Slump

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Bounce back from a mid-career slump.

Think about how you felt at the start of your career. Chances are, you were excited about the possibilities that lay ahead, and keen to develop your skills and expertise. You were full of ideas, and you probably set ambitious goals to keep yourself moving forward.

Toward the end of your working life, there's a good chance that you'll feel satisfied and rewarded by how far you've come. You'll hopefully have had ample opportunities to develop your knowledge and skills and, as a result, you'll be respected and consulted on key projects. You might also be nearing retirement and looking forward to the next stage of your life.

So, where does that leave the people in the middle, who have established their career but are a long way from retirement? They can experience a drop in their levels of motivation and enthusiasm, and they might struggle to find their work as exciting as they did when their career began.

In this article, we'll look at what you can do to get out of this sort of mid-career slump.

Losing Your Motivation Mid-Career

Research shows that, for many people, job satisfaction   is U-shaped over time. In other words, you start and end your career on a high, but you experience a slump or plateau in the middle. There are several reasons for this.

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