How To Navigate Your Mid-Career Transition

The transition from early to mid-career professional can be challenging for some. With advancement or promotion, your responsibilities are likely to shift towards the strategic thinking that will shape up the future direction for a program, unit, or department. This often brings a change in responsibilities, priorities, and expectations to reflect your growth as an expert in your field. In this article, we will use our own experiences to provide advice if you are finding yourself in this transition point. We’ll explore strategies for looking at the programmatic “big picture” and taking ideas from the conceptual to the actualization phase.

A note before we progress further: This article is geared towards individuals who have decided that they want to pursue promotions or leadership positions. This is not the trajectory that everyone chooses. Past HigherEdJobs articles explored the ways in which you can continue to find meaningful work on your own terms, for example “What If You Don’t Want To Be Promoted?” piece provides valuable insights. We’ve also written about using a “Good Enough Framework” when you find yourself at a professional crossroads.

Shifting Your Mindset

When first beginning a career in higher education, your responsibilities may include tasks such as planning events, executing workshops, or maintaining an advising load to work directly with students. Over time, you become knowledgeable about timelines, stakeholders, and have developed go-to solutions when typical challenges arise.

When you advance to a leadership position, it is important to take some time to engage in ongoing reflections to become aware of your growing expertise, as well as to be strategic about cultivating an expert presence that is well-perceived by others. Whether you are looking for advancement on your campus or potentially moving in the future, your success and growth at an organization is determined by how others perceive you and your capabilities.

1. Team expertise: You bring unique value to your team, whether subject matter expertise, operational excellence, or ideally both. How can you become the go-to person for certain projects or conversations?
2. When interacting with other units and colleagues who are not involved in your day-to-day, is there a way for you to capture your cross-team contributions and convey them across units? Whether it is a lunch-and-learn or helping organize university-wide committees, you will likely utilize the expertise you’ve developed to help other units with similar constituents or challenges, and in turn become a trusted resource locally.
3. Lastly, many units provide professional development funds to staff members to attend conferences. You are more likely to receive the funding if chosen as a presenter or panelist. Leverage resources provided, including a mentorship program, committee work, or volunteer to review conference proposals. By familiarizing yourself with evaluation criteria, you may find yourself well-positioned to write one soon!

As you develop expertise and a campus-wide reputation, you will likely experience increased responsibilities and have some decision-making power. Authority is often a prerequisite for higher-level positions and leadership roles. By being comfortable with your authority, you can position yourself for advancement and career growth. Accepting your authority can help you make sound judgments with confidence, even in challenging situations.

Once you feel at ease with your professional power, you can also guide and motivate your team, even when you are peer-like to other members. For those with supervisees, you can inspire confidence and delegate tasks more effectively. Since management, teamwork, and collaboration are often key to mid-career or higher positions, these aspects will challenge you to learn new skills and become more confident and capable. Embracing authority can also foster personal growth and development.

Creating a Strategic Vision

Creating an overall vision for your work, unit, program, or department also becomes a major priority when moving into a leadership position. This can be a difficult process to navigate, especially if you focused heavily on daily tasks in your previous position. A question to keep in mind is this: how is the work that I and/or my team is doing helping us make progress towards the mission and strategic plan we have identified? If the answer is, “It is not,” then it will be your responsibility to redirect efforts towards something that will help you make positive progress.

We have both experienced this reality, and have come to find the following helps with this process:

1. Develop a mission statement: A mission statement is something that is often utilized in industry, but they can have a strong utility within higher education. Having a statement that clearly establishes your overall goals creates a guidepost for all of the strategies, programs or initiatives you implement throughout an academic year.
2. Define metrics of success: Year-end reports are a fact of life in higher education. As you advance into leadership positions, it will become your responsibility to provide summaries for your unit’s work, and you will need quantitative and qualitative data to support these summaries. Defining what success means for you and your team is crucial to then identifying the methods needed to collect data throughout the year.
3. Map out a strategic plan: Once you have a mission statement in place, set short-, medium- and long-term goals that will help your unit advance towards accomplishing the mission. In doing this, you will create a strategic plan that defines a clear pathway forward and gives you/your team a clearer understanding for why and how your work matters — something that can sometimes be overshadowed when attending to the day-to-day tasks that so often have our focus. To get buy-in for your unit, make sure to align your strategic plan with anything already in place at the college and/or university level. Doing so ensures that the progress you make and the data you collect can be used when the time comes to advocate for more resources. If you can justify how your efforts are contributing to the larger picture, then it becomes easier to garner support from your leadership and beyond.

Sometimes aligning your work strategically with the greater vision and planning of the university is not enough. With limited resources and competing priorities, senior leaders often have to make hard decisions about their priorities. You still need to become comfortable with creating buy-in and generating leadership support for your work. For instance, you may use market insights, benchmarking against peer institutions, or a combination of storytelling and data to make a strong case about what organizational value you can generate with the resources that you are advocating for.

If you are reading this and nodding, we welcome you to the mid-career club! It is an exciting time to be in a new professional phase, and a great reminder of your accomplishments. Like any other transition, moving forward comes with change and uncertainty, especially for those who desire higher titles or responsibilities in the future. Remember that you are in your new role because of your expertise, and you are making progress towards your career goals — whatever they may be.