I've seen a lot of discussion lately in the comments about quiet quitting, disengaging from your career, and more — so I thought we'd discuss. What are your best tips on ways to stay engaged in your career? Why do you think it's important to stay engaged — or the flip side? Can you be engaged in your career and still have a work-life balance more heavily weighted towards life?

A question I'd be interested to hear some of the readers ponder: What are the best ways to stay engaged in your career when you're in a lockstep system like BigLaw, where everyone advances at the same rate and is paid the same?

{related: disengaging instead of quitting vs leaning out}

Why to Stay Engaged In Your Career

There are 168 hours in the week. If you have a strict 40-hour workweek and sleep for 7 hours a night, you're at work a full third of your time. I can tell you from experience: If you're not engaged, work is going to be a slog. Furthermore, it often feels like the main consequence of being disengaged is that you're unproductive, requiring more time at work.

In 2022 terms, this doesn't mean that quiet quitting or leaning out is bad — it feels like there is a huge movement that is reassessing what people want from their jobs, as well as what kind of work-life balance they prefer.

{related: how to set work-life boundaries}

Hopefully the below tips will be an on-ramp back to being engaged in your career and your job, regardless of whether you've been willfully disengaged for a while or if you find yourself disengaging by accident.

3 Ways to Stay Engaged In Your Career

Reengage with Your Career by Learning Something New

If you've been doing the same things at your job for a while now, mix things up by learning a new skill, an alternative way of doing things, or more niche facts. Some employers might keep lists of different skills (I know my old law firm did); you may also be able to look at your coworkers and classmates and see what things they've done that you just don't know about. Another option here: Find a conference or course you can take that is related to your current job.

• How to Keep Learning at Work
• The Best Online Women's Management Training
• Strategic Volunteering — Do You Do It?

Look for Complementary Career Paths

This kind of comes back to learning something new, as well as networking — there are probably a number of things you can do with your degree, job experience, skills, and interests — and it might be interesting to explore those. For example, a BigLaw lawyer might want to learn about smaller firms, in-house work, teaching, or transitioning to another job entirely for one of their legal clients. Don't forget about connecting with old classmates — it might be interesting to see where some have landed.

Some of our previous posts on this topic that might be of interest:

• Career Pivots: How to Change Your Career in a Major Way
• How to Build Your Network — And Maintain It
• Networking in Your Niche — But Outside Your Company
• Tips for Finding and Joining Professional Organizations

Tip #3 for Staying Engaged: Mentoring

If you're at the point where you want to disengage a bit, you've also probably reached the stage where you have some wisdom and can pass it along to someone else. It's as easy as asking a more junior coworker out to lunch — and note that it may even help you if you realize they have newer skills that you do not (tip #1) or if they're aware of different career paths you haven't considered.

• Mentoring Advice: How to Be a Great Mentor and Mentee

Readers, what do you think are the best ways to stay engaged in your career? Do the answers change if you're in a lockstep system like BigLaw? What do you think are the benefits to staying engaged?

{related: when to quit your career — and how to know if your job is right for you}

Stock photo via Stencil.

The post 3 Ways to Stay Engaged In Your Career appeared first on Corporette.com.

There have been a few interesting threadjacks recently about readers reassessing where they live, who they work for, and even their entire career path — so I thought it might be an interesting discussion. Are you reassessing your career and lifestyle? Is it in response to the pandemic (or in response to others' responses, such as your office going mostly remote), to politics (e.g., deciding to move after Dobbs), climate change, or due to other reasons? I'm curious — do you feel like the past few years of decreased social outings gave you more time for introspection, and that you have more insight now into what you want or need?

Here are the questions:

• Are you changing your lifestyle or career in a major way?
• How are you going about the changes, i.e., what steps are you taking to research or enact the changes?
• What do you see the pros and cons of the change?
• What do you still NOT know about the change?

We haven't spoken about how to change your career in a major way in a few years… In the past, I've identified three things that helped me change my career from lawyer to online content creator: 1) research, 2) assess the quality of life differences, 3) identify what you don't know, 4) network, and 5) make the leap.

I think these steps still help you with major career changes as well as major lifestyle changes, although I think the big thing that is #3, which is that you don't know if or how the next few years of viruses, climate change, politics and other factors will play out. (For my $.02, it feels like life is going to continue to feel pretty volatile on a lot of these fronts for the foreseeable future.)

Some of our previous posts that might help if you're considering a big change:

How to Research a New Career

• 5 Books To Read if You're Considering Changing Your Career
• The Pros and Cons of Changing Careers (From People Who've Done It)
• Tips from Readers on Changing Careers
• How to Ask Your Interviewer about Work-Life Balance
• All About Strategic Volunteering
• How to Conduct a Long-Distance Job Search (and Jobhunting in a Different City)
• How to Secretly Use Linked In to Change Careers
• How to Change Jobs, But Not Companies
• When is a Lower Salary Worth It?
• How Your Career Affects Your Happiness

What to Consider Before Moving and Other Big Lifestyle Changes

• What to Consider Before Moving to a Lower Cost of Living Area
• What to Consider If You're Thinking About Moving to the Suburbs
• Do the Benefits of Living Closer to Work Outweigh the Cons?
• Where You Live is One of the Biggest Money Decisions You Make
• How to Take a Job Far From Friends and Family

How to Be More Social

• How to Make New Friends and Network
• How to Form a Group of Girlfriends as an Adult
• How to Make Time for Friends If You Work A Lot

How to Cut Expenses If You're Taking a Paycut

• Tips from a Lawyer-Turned-Student

Psst: These are some of our favorite books if you're considering changing your career

Stock photo via Stencil.

The post What Career and Lifestyle Changes Are You Making in 2022? appeared first on Corporette.com.

A few weeks ago I saw an interesting Twitter thread from Business Insider about how, while there's much being written right now about “the Great Resignation,” there's actually something more common happening around the globe with workers: disengagement.

They posited that instead of outright quitting, people were disengaging with their work — phoning it in, not taking on as many projects as they could, feigning being busy. (Acting like there's more to life than career! The nerve!) I thought it was a really interesting topic — particularly when set against what a lot of us probably think about now as “leaning out” (or even just general work-life balance!!) — so let's discuss.

Have you ever disengaged from work instead of quitting? Have you ever managed someone who disengaged from work instead of quitting? Where are the boundaries between disengaging, leaning out, and having healthy work-life balance — and is there a business etiquette associated with them? (And how does all of this compare to burnout?)

Psst — they're also calling this “quiet quitting“!

I recognize this from my own work history, to be honest, although I would have called it “treading water” instead of being disengaged. At a certain point in my legal career I decided other matters took priority, and instead of Striving! to! Make! Partner! or even looking for a better job for the long run, I just… treaded water at my BigLaw job. I did the work assigned to me without being overly concerned about my ultimate hours. I still worked late, still did good work (on good cases, for the most part; I was very lucky in my career!) and still got my full bonuses … but it was a far, far cry from the Go-Getter attitude I'd had all during law school and the first year or two of practice. (I would not advise this in the BigLaw of today… I could kind of get away with it way back when because business was booming.)

I remember thinking at the time that this was the natural way of things — a sign of adulthood, even — that instead of trying to “go hard” the way I'd gone in law school, I should recognize that my career has a longer timeline, and that my career shouldn't be the only thing in my life. (I actually used to have the mantra “My job is not my career is not my life.”) It was me trying to find some semblance of work-life balance, for the first time ever in my life. (I also have some shame in even telling you guys this, even though so many years have passed — like I was doing something wrong by not Striving Super Hard to be the best third year associate to ever third year associate!)

I'm really interested to hear what you guys think about this. For my own $.02, I'd define these slight but important differences:

• Treading water / being mildly disengaged / “prioritizing work-life balance”: Doing the work required of you but nothing more — “keep the job” instead of “advance the career” kind of thinking. I'd hopefully think most pandemic-related work disruption would fall into this category, e.g., as parents manage erratic school schedules / sick family members / disruption of regular care schedules.
• Being burned out: Being unable to engage with work at the level to which you'd like to because you actively need to prioritize self-care, sleep, Life Outside of Work-type things to reconnect with yourself — “Who am I and what am I doing here?” kind of thinking, with job/career being totally secondary.
• Leaning out; Similar to treading water but perhaps with a set end date (baby's second birthday, for example, or birth of a second child); hopefully done intentionally enough that there's a conversation with management about flexible work, reduced hours, etc. “Pause/decrease the job in a way that leaves you an on-ramp back to full job/advancing career” kind of thinking.
• Disengaging instead of quitting: Intentionally doing as little work as possible, feigning being busy, and taking every shortcut necessary. Think George Costanza. I would call this kind of thinking “indifference to end of career/job.”

Readers, what are your thoughts? (And are there other categories that you would add in this list — go-getters who are striving to prove themselves at the job? Movers who are intentionally trying to level up their career by seeking a new job or more responsibilities/titles at their current job?) Do you think workers should signal to their managers as they move in and out of these different attitudes toward work, or that business etiquette dictates that conversations be had?

If you've managed people in any of these categories, were there red flags for you as a manager — and how did you handle that? For readers who recognize themselves as being disengaged or treading water, how did you reengage or “start swimming” again?

Stock photo via Shutterstock / Dean Robot; “whatever” in font Perfect Redemption.

The post Disengaging Instead of Quitting (vs. Leaning Out vs. Work-Life Balance) appeared first on Corporette.com.

When should you quit your career? How do you know when you've chosen the wrong one? How long should you give yourself before you quit — and how many jobs should you try in that career? Reader F has SUCH a great question about this:

Question for you: how do you know if you hate your particular JOB or hate your whole CAREER? I'm a first year associate in (the biggest of) big law, and I know it was supposed to be hard — I knew I was going to bill 200 hours a month coming into this! — but I think my position might be particularly hard because of people I work for.

How do I know the difference between a challenging environment (and maybe should switch jobs) or a terrible career choice (and maybe should switch careers)? At what point do you throw in the towel and say, “It's not them, it's me”?

I can't wait to hear what readers say here because I think this is something a LOT of people — particularly entry-level BigLaw lawyers — struggle with.

We've talked about changing careers before (the pros and cons of different careers, as well as my own experience in career changes. While I had yet to find my fit in the law before I decided to focus on this blog, many of our readers are happy lawyers, and hopefully they'll have some great advice for Reader F.

For what it's worth, though, here's my take:

Reader F is less than one year in. She's just spent three years of her life getting this degree — and unless she was fantastically lucky to get a ton of scholarships, significant money has undoubtedly been spent. 

Considering the investment of money and time, I would suggest she owes it to herself to spend at least as many years being a lawyer. I remember years ago a reader shared her “two year rule” for new jobs:

My theory on job satisfaction is that anyone can do any job for 2 years. The first 6 months you are still learning the job and meeting everyone. The next 6 months you are getting the hang of it so you're actually starting to get into a comfort zone and enjoy it. The third 6 months is when you start to realize, hey this job kind of sucks. Then in the last 6 months you are able to power through because you've already started planning and taking actions to get to your next job.

After 2 years, unless you can honestly say you're fully engaged and loving your job, then you better start making a move before you totally burn out without an exit plan.

(Maddeningly, I can't find it on the site right now, only in my personal OneNote.) Anyhow: I hadn't heard it put like that before, but I agree with it, and I think two years is long enough to avoid the appearance of job hopping.

So I would say, Reader F, power through in your BigLaw job.

Definitely try to get work with other people (since that sounds like it's a main component of your current discontent), and possibly try other paths in your job, such as doing both litigation and corporate. You could talk with HR about getting more flexible hours, or job sharing. You could even try to change offices within your BigLaw job, and move to a different city where the vibe is different. After you've been there about 1.5 years, start looking for a new job.

(Unless you want to clerk, in which case, start now!)

{related: are there any happy lawyers?}

At that point, I'd suggest connecting with a good recruiter (or a career coach) and explore what might be a good next move in the law: another BigLaw job, perhaps in a different city? A smaller law firm? A non-profit job? Government work? A clerkship?

Psst: These are some of our favorite books if you're considering changing your career

There are different pros and cons to each — but I think you can definitely get another 2 years out of your next move. After those two years are up, you should have even more options in the law (such as working in house), outside the law (such as finding a job where having a JD is a benefit but not required — at least in my experience those are usually more senior positions), or in a law-related field (such as my friend who became a law librarian).

After four years, you could also make a total career change. Keep in mind that at this point, you may or may not have a family to consider, also, which tends to change things — you may need flexibility, a certain income, a different city, whatever.

The one caveat, I would say, would be if Reader F was really curious about another field that is a better fit for an energetic, unattached 20-something (if that indeed describes Reader F). 

For example, when I was around 30 I considered switching to a consulting career; it sounded fun to me. My friends who had done it strongly, strongly encouraged me to ignore that avenue, noting that the work and travel requirements are not conducive to someone who was, at that point, looking for a change from BigLaw hours.

A friend who got her MBA in her late '20s was strongly encouraged away from investment banking for similar reasons. Similarly, you may want to consider a bigger adventure, such as working abroad — it's certainly not impossible with a family, but logistically it's a lot easier if it's just you.

In the meantime, Reader F, avoid those golden handcuffs, particularly with an apartment you're never in, SAVE, and make a serious dent in any student loans you have.

Ladies, what are your thoughts — when should you throw in the towel with your career? What factors would make you switch?

Updated images via Stencil. Originally pictured (book): my job sucks, originally uploaded to Flickr by Cyndy.)

The post Your Job, Your Career, or You: When to Quit Your Career appeared first on Corporette.com.

Have you heard of “strategic volunteering” — and are you doing it? Do you do it at a high level (board member or committee level)? How did you get started doing it — were you interested in the organization, did you purposely do it for networking, or did you somehow fall into it? We've talked about this in the context of making new friends, as well as pondering what professional organizations you should join and how to get on a board— but we haven't really talked about strategic volunteering.

I'm way under the weather today, so I've been lying in bed catching up on reading, watching TED, and playing Candy Crush. (I honestly can't remember the last time I had a sick day!)  One of the articles I'm trying to catch up on (if the NYT didn't have a huge banner ad that pops up right in the middle of the text) is the recent one about how “the opt out generation wants back in.” Anyway, I was particularly interested to hear about the role that volunteering played in returns to work:

Among the women I spoke with, those who didn’t have the highest academic credentials or highest-powered social networks or who hadn’t been sufficiently “strategic” in their volunteering (fund-raising for a Manhattan private school could be a nice segue back into banking; running bake sales for the suburban swim team tended not to be a career-enhancer) or who had divorced, often struggled greatly.

So, ladies — are you strategic in your volunteering? How much time do you devote to volunteering in general? If you were to try to do strategic volunteering, what would you do?

{related: unconventional ways to build your network}

Updated images via Stencil. Originally pictured: Fundraising in the dictionary, originally uploaded to Flickr by HowardLake.

Psst: These are some of our favorite books if you're considering changing your career

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