Are you a senior individual contributor with over ten years of experience in a specific domain or career? Have you gained a significantly wide range of skills in your career? Have you worked on developing your specialization in a particular niche?
As an experienced professional, you are at the level where you could translate your knowledge into leadership if you play it right. If you strategize your approaches well enough, you could be the next-in-line candidate for a potential opportunity to be in a supervisory, management, or leadership role.
It is a difficult stage of the career
Being in a “sandwich” career position is no doubt one of the most challenging positions.
On the one hand, your team members or peers admire you and look up to you for guidance. As a result, you may have a certain level of insecurity to lose your place in a more vibrant workforce entering the workplace.
On the other hand, your upstream management may have a whole range of expectations of you regarding specific outcomes and behaviors. As a result, you are likely to have a certain level of anxiety thinking of ways to look good in front of the upstream management.
More often, you may have challenges in pinning down how you should really come across on both sides of the fence to increase your chances of moving forward at a faster rate. For that reason, not all senior individual contributors find it easy to navigate this position and speed up their careers further.
