I was not able to spot mid-career stagnation until this happened…

Many are not aware of career stagnation and know how "PAUSE and ACT" may help here.

My picture above do show the lack of energy while on a daily commute over London Waterloo. This is how i looked when i was stagnated in 2015!! Read on about what saved me from this…

I probably spotted my own IT mid-career stagnation in 2015, while in the UK. I was then working for a leading services firm and managing quite large-scale IT programs in the utility industry.

As you know, Utilities is a regulated industry so working as a senior manager for such an industry is very complex. My work mainly dealt with managing investments and getting them approved as programs for the design and Start-Up phase.

I also delivered mandates along with a team of very senior architects and lead Business analysts program which had near real time reporting along with data processing scope.

This was akin to giving birth to mid to large scale programs and I competed in my roles with other investment opportunities that were pitched towards the sponsoring board, and many were non IS or Non IT initiatives.

My life for 6 years in the UK was very predictable and it was more from my job role than my location. I took a daily train towards London Waterloo and met almost the same set of people who worked at the same office.

Photo by Poltron Pop on Unsplash

Most of the time in the commute, I would talk with other colleagues about visa and weekend plans. There was nothing new left in my personal or professional life to talk about. Just like a perpetual wait for a long-term visa. Even that did not seem to be the end goal.

All my weekends were planning groceries and paying this and that bills. I sort of followed this cycle for 4 odd years and somewhere I had accepted this as part of life.

I kept track of my ex-colleagues who would leave the UK for the US market or Australian market and be in touch via messages over LinkedIn, but the conversation was still the same.

This would have continued if not for a “PAUSE AND ACT” which prompted me to pursue a short internet course on Python and OpenCV over one of those Christmas holidays.

The course was online, but it was different from the enterprise licensed technology I understood .It opened me to the magic of Open Source work which in previous decade was very limited to only desktop apps and computing.

I was doing face and facial feature identification using Python and OpenCV, and this stuff made me happy.

That was in 2015 and then I started using my weekends to build mostly Python applications mostly with electronics like Raspberry Pi and kept experimenting with web cameras and OpenCV.

One thing led to another and there came a stage where I was not able to do advanced computer vision without machine learning and I ended up learning ML then through self-projects and using codes from Git.

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But, coming back to the point of identification of stagnation I can recall these:

• Being in a loop with thoughts especially in professional life. For me it was a visa and which country next to move in. Just for records by then I had already lived in Singapore and Germany.

• There was no creative discussion around my peer group other than weekend plans, property, stocks and India trip

• There was a period of salary stagnation and a lack of game-changing job offers. All jobs seemed at that point as an extension of the previous job

• I talked the same thing with my family over most of the time

• I had no plans about anything and every day at work seemed a déjà vu.

What I suggest now looking back is – PAUSE

Yes, pause your professional life for a week, take a leave and do some introspection.

PS: An AI imagination of this article as an image.

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This worked for me when I decided to PAUSE in one of the Christmas holiday breaks and I PAUSED the below –

• I took a pause from mindless shopping and new year sales

• I took a pause from flying back to India during the new year and being a part of the mad rush everywhere

• I paused and did nothing for a week but take notes about my feelings in a notebook

• I paused and took action to do a hobby project (It was a fun project to detect a yellow tennis ball using an external webcam and Python)

• I paused and took kickboxing at a nearby sports gym

Working project to project did not help me beyond a certain stage and I think you can try to pause too and take some actions to introspect and see what else can be done.

At the end of the day, all our judgments at this stage may be different but the key is to pause and act.

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