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One of the nuanced phenomena in academic and research careers occurs when individuals put great effort into developing themselves, persisting against all the obstacles and barriers thrown in their way, landing eventual career success and stability, and then implicitly assuming that they will continue to maintain that rate of career progression and improvement (if that’s what they’re interested in).
But almost all people will at some stage, after plenty of career progression, start to run into their actual capability, skillset and/or intellectual ceiling. This is not an arbitrary “the system screwing you” type ceiling – this is a more organic actual ceiling where you simply don’t have the firepower – in whatever it is that you need to – to really be effective at the “next level up” – whatever that means.
Now, this is usually not a hard rigid ceiling but rather a soft fuzzy one: with enough effort, you can continue to push that ceiling up, to stretch the metaphor. But your rate of progress will radically slow down: the slope of the learning curve when first starting is not the same as the slope when you are already highly accomplished and trying to make further gains.
In my mentoring and advising, I see a lot of frustration when people start to slow down or plateau, and assume – quite naturally – that it’s just the barriers and competitiveness of the system holding them back. That’s a natural instinct – and is often true especially in the early stages of careers – but at some stage, it will actually be just as much about you hitting your limits.
Once they recognize this as a possible explanation – very gently introduced – it’s actually quite liberating, because they take the pressure off their shoulders of the assumption of ever-continuing advancement at the current rate, and instead can step back, re-assess, and think a bit more strategically around what they want to do. They can continue to try to progress – but they know progress will likely be slower, often much slower.
Not an issue typically encountered early in careers – it’s the usual challenges there – but definitely one that pops up quite a bit in more established careers, especially for ambitious, forward-looking individualsโฆ and today’s #HackingAcademia video topic.
careers #progression #development #ceilings #plateau #progress
Full Video Notes
As I do a lot of mentoring and advising for people in academia and research careers, much of my work is about helping people learn how to navigate, and hopefully thrive in, the pressure cooker that is academic and research life. It can often seem like there are endless barriers, obstacles and challenges thrown in people’s way. Some of them are rational and understandable. Others are frankly irrational and things you shouldn’t have to deal with, but nevertheless have to navigate. Unsurprisingly, that becomes a major focus of mentoring and advisory work, particularly for people early in their careers.
A successful path through this critical formative stage of your career often looks like gradually overcoming these adversities and challenges, landing your first significant wins, perhaps securing your first faculty position if you stay in academia, and then progressing through promotions, leadership responsibilities and bigger opportunities if that’s the direction you choose to pursue.
This can be one of the most exciting and exhilarating periods of your career. You’re on what we would call a steep learning curve, picking up new knowledge every day, putting those insights into practice and eventually reaping the rewards.
One of the challenges, though, is that eventually you will begin to encounter what I would call your natural performance ceilings, for want of a better phrase. What I see happen quite often is that people struggle to distinguish between two very different situations.
The first is that the system is genuinely holding them back. They feel that if they could just overcome the bureaucracy, politics or structural obstacles, they would be successful in the new endeavour or position.
The second possibility is that they are genuinely beginning to reach the current limits of their capabilities and skill set.
This is where the topic becomes a little controversial.
For someone who is passionate, hardworking and dedicated to their craft, there is almost an unlimited range of things they can continue to achieve. However, I personally believe, although I know not everyone shares this view, that people do have different fundamental limitations in their capabilities. You can certainly move the dial with deliberate practice and hard work, but eventually you begin approaching relatively firm limits, particularly in fields that require very specialised intellectual capabilities or highly advanced technical skill sets. Beyond a certain point, no amount of additional effort will dramatically improve performance.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with reaching one of these limits. There are an almost infinite number of ways you can continue making valuable contributions and progressing in your career. Nevertheless, these limits do introduce constraints.
The real problem I see is that many people never even consider this possibility. They become extremely frustrated, and often quite depressed, because they feel as though they’ve hit a plateau and are no longer progressing. This can be particularly difficult for people who experienced a meteoric rise during the previous five years of their career, where they seemed to achieve one success after another.
So how do you tell the difference between a system that’s genuinely putting barriers in your way and a situation where you’re beginning to encounter your own current limitations?
The advice is much the same as it is for many difficult career questions. Talk to people who are more experienced than you and whose judgement you trust. Ask them whether they believe you’re simply encountering systemic barriers, or whether they think you’re beginning to reach the limits of your current capabilities.
So what can you do if that’s the case?
With enough effort and focus, you can continue improving the areas that are currently limiting you. However, eventually that improvement becomes much slower. Early on, when you’re developing a new capability, the learning curve is often very steep and progress comes rapidly. As you move closer to what I would describe as your natural soft limits, not hard limits because you can always improve to some extent, that rate of improvement slows dramatically.
That slowdown can itself be incredibly frustrating.
If you genuinely want to improve in an area that’s limiting your future progression, you absolutely can. You simply need to recognise that your rate of improvement is likely to be much slower than it was earlier in your career.
A related concept I’ve discussed in other videos is the perverse effect of early career success. Sometimes people experience major success very early, and then feel as though they’ve had five years without any meaningful achievements afterwards. Often that’s simply because they achieved an unusually early success, perhaps punching above their weight, and then spent several years catching up to that level.
The concept I’m talking about here is different. It’s about beginning to approach your own natural soft limits, recognising that this may explain some of the slowdown in your career progression, and accepting that further improvements in those capabilities will occur much more gradually than they did when you first developed them.
So how do you approach this topic with someone you’re mentoring?
First, you need to be reasonably confident that this is genuinely a possibility, rather than simply someone dealing with a temporary collection of obstacles or setbacks.
Second, one gentle way to introduce the idea is to remind them of just how much progress they’ve already made over the previous few years. Point out that it is entirely normal for that extraordinary rate of progress to slow down at some stage. Expecting to continue climbing at exactly the same rate for an entire career isn’t particularly realistic and would actually be quite unusual.
Almost everyone eventually reaches a plateau.
Interestingly, once people recognise that they may be in this position, it can actually be quite liberating. It allows them to take some of the pressure off themselves. Instead of expecting continual, extraordinary career acceleration, they can become more strategic and deliberate about where they invest their effort.
They can recognise that future progress is likely to be slower simply because they’re already operating at a relatively accomplished level. They can then continue investing in training and professional development with realistic expectations, knowing that they will continue to improve, but that those improvements will arrive more gradually than they once did.
And, importantly, that’s exactly what they signed up for.