Career Stagnation: How to Overcome the Experience Gap

Are you trying to advance your career but keep getting blocked by a lack of experience?

Even though you’ve been grinding for ages and working your ass off, you’re still being told you’re not good enough.

It can feel like the world is conspiring against you to keep you down.

How are you supposed to gain experience when all the opportunities are being taken from you by people who already have experience?

Well this is a problem that requires a change in perspective in order to solve and prevent career stagnation.

Stagnation and Passivity

Life’s full of ups and downs and that’s what makes it interesting. As long as you’re on an upward trend overall then everything balances out in your favour.

But the worst feeling in life is when you realise you’ve plateaued for way too long and time is just passing without anything happening.

Things get progressively more boring and depressing.

Because we spend the majority of our lives working, career stagnation is the main element of this boredom. This is when you feel stuck in your job with little to no growth or progress.

It’s a key moment that will determine your health and well being for the rest of your life depending on what you choose to do next.

The stagnation occurs because you’ve stopped actively participating in life.

Life is like an around the world road trip. Lets say you’ve started in London and driven to Paris but once you get to Paris you just stop and sit in your car waiting for stuff to happen.

Eventually you feel that you don’t really like Paris, but the drive over was so long and epic that you just resign to stay there and hope something good happens.

And that’s what happens to people in careers, you get to your destination and just sit there, don’t like it and stagnate.

Being proactive i.e actively participating in life means getting out of the car and exploring the city fully or continuing the road trip to another destination.

But most people tend to wait for something to happen to them instead of being proactive.

Seeking Experience Inauthentically

But what if you are trying to be proactive in your career but when you go exploring you can’t access areas because you don’t have the required experience?

This is a massive hurdle that can make us head back to the car to sit and stagnate.

Pushing through it, is what I’d call “fake it till, you make it”, this requires a lot of confidence and courage that not everyone has.

For me personally I think I lacked confidence and courage to do certain things but also had a strong sense of personal integrity and was very judgemental of myself.

I still feel resistance to do something publicly that I’ve not done before as if I’ve have done it.

It feels deceptive and fraudulent to me. I feel like my integrity is at risk and the thought of losing that is unbearable.

But I realised operating from this mindset makes it really difficult to gain experience and grow in life.

The Problem with Systematized Structured Learning

We have systems and structured experience programs like Schools and Universities that are set up as protected learning environments. People can gain experience without the perceived risk of faking it.

Its acknowledged that you’re a beginner and you don’t feel judged in comparison to experienced accomplished persons. You’re guided by more experienced people through the challenge of acquiring the experience and skill that you don’t already possess.

However in any given area there’s only so much you can be taught in conventional learning systems until you plateau and stagnate.

Some experiences simply can’t be taught, you just need to experience them.

These are the experiences we need to get to a higher level where we feel the excitement and stimulation of life again.

But we have to overcome the experience gap. This is the discrepancy between the skills you have and the skills required for the roles you aspire to.

Fear of being a beginner

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of gaining experience as a requirement for career advancement.

Whilst I’ve been learning and developing myself on a public platform it hit me that--the experiences most likely to cause career stagnation are the ones which are on public display.

You think people are going to see you sucking and failing at something and your brain can’t process any further than that feeling of shame.

Here’s a hypothetical situation:

If you’d have said to me a couple of years ago,

“Lewis we have a special GP job that you’d love, with higher pay. The only thing is that in order for you to be considered you have to have a Youtube channel with over 10000 subscribers and you have to show you’re face in every video talking to the camera.”

I would have said sorry I can’t do that, the job sounds like I might love it but I guess its just not for me. It’ll probably end up sucking anyway I don’t want the job.

And that’s what it comes down to, how badly do you really want it?

In the context of having to go through an uncomfortable experience in order to get a job that I’m not 100% sure about, I’m gonna head back to sit in the car.

The requirement to gain a difficult specific experience in isolation will always block people who don’t have the desire.

The issue isn’t the hurdle itself, its that we lack the creativity and desire to get around it, so it just appears as this all consuming barrier that is just going to lead to failure.

So whats the solution?

You have to find something that gives you the desire and creativity to get around the experience gap.

You have to work for yourself on your own projects to gain the experience in a way that is more natural and based on your goals.

Take leadership experience for example suppose you’re a professional seeking a promotion or looking for new job but don’t have leadership experience.

All the opportunities for you to get leadership experience will be given to the people who already have leadership experience or more experience than you.

So what you have to do is make your own opportunity.

Focus on something you’re passionate about, something that you can do better than anyone else.

And its at this point you may need to consider a career change to realign yourself with your passion.

Working for yourself doesn’t have to be starting your own business it just means doing something meaningful to you personally which you’re in control of.

The energy of your passion will help you overcome the lack of confidence and give you the courage to acquire all the skills you lack in an authentic way.

The belief in your passion surpasses the experience gap. This is where the people that say ‘fake it, till you make it’ get the confidence and courage from.

If you don’t feel confident or brave enough, find a passion project that you’re willing to overcome yourself for.

Putting yourself out there and being a beginner will start to feel exciting rather than scary.

Passion creates an optimistic energy where if you mess up you don’t suffer as much because you know you have the energy to carry on and try again until you get it right.

By choosing and creating a project that represents you and your unique passion you automatically have the confidence of any expert even though you’re a beginner.

You gain experience around your passion which is much easier than just focusing on the experience in isolation with no personal meaning to relate it to and waiting to be gifted an opportunity.

You have to create the opportunity by immersing yourself in the passion that you actually care about, the purpose you feel most strongly about.

Then eventually it will lead to you being offered jobs because people will see the evidence of experience from what you have built just by you naturally following through with the project that you wanted to do for yourself.

This is why its so important that your career is something you’re truly passionate about and you do it for the right reasons.

The time you spend waiting or searching for job opportunities would be much better spent working on your own passion project and making that into your job.

The internet and social media are available for you to make this happen. Using it purely for entertainment is just a distraction that’s stealing time from you.

That’s all for now

Lewis