Your Career

How to manage your way out of a stagnant career

When you hit a wall, careerwise, your immediate instinct is to blame the position — or the institution that created it — as the source of the problem. And sometimes that’s the case. Certainly higher education can be a daunting place to work, especially for people who are untenured, who work in staff roles, or who come from underrepresented or less-privileged backgrounds. But for any number of reasons — financial, family, field — you might be unable to quit your job or leave academe. Discussions of the structural underpinnings of workplace dissatisfaction are important and necessary. But they offer thin gruel for anyone hungry for immediate, practical career guidance. So which aspects of your predicament can you control? What changes could you make to improve your own situation?

While quitting your faculty or staff job, or acquiring more credentials, might be the appropriate next step, those aren’t your only options. The more complex and constrained that you perceive your outward circumstances to be, the more you stand to benefit from refocusing on things you can actually influence: your own mind-set and actions.

For six tips on that front, continue reading: “But What if You Can’t Quit Your Dead-End Job?,” by Maria LaMonaca Wisdom

Share your suggestions for the newsletter with Denise Magner, an editor at The Chronicle, at denise.magner@chronicle.com. If you’d like to opt out, you can log in to our website and manage your newsletter preferences here.

What we’re reading

Here’s more on career issues and trends from around the web. See something we should include? Let me know.

• In the Harvard Business Review, a new survey of senior executives suggests that “remote work isn’t going away” and employers “know it.”
• An essay in The Atlantic argues that “stress drinking has a gender divide.”
• More book recommendations, this time from The New York Times, which offers its dual lists of 34 fiction and 33 nonfiction books coming out this fall.