8 Tips to Maintain Relevance and Significance in Your Career

Fearing becoming antiquated can affect professional relationships and motivation. Recognizing and addressing this fear is crucial for maintaining relevance and significance in your career.

When we doubt our significance, comparisons can be a healthy way to learn from others if we use it to accurately gauge our strengths and opportunities. 

Here are 6 tips to maintain relevance and significance in your career.

1. Make an Inventory of your Unique Talents: 

Honestly assess and gather feedback on your unique skills and contributions. Gather tangible evidence of your contributions through feedback from colleagues and find out what they believe makes your skills uniquely valuable. 

Ask experts you respect about which capabilities you should focus on strengthening to remain valuable and relevant in the future.

2. Focus on Irreplaceable Human Skills: 

Emphasize empathy, curiosity, and resilience - qualities that technology cannot replicate. 

For early-career professionals particularly anxious about technologies like AI and robotics, don’t try to outrun their productivity or analytical powers. Instead, lean into human capabilities like empathy, curiosity, and resilience. 

People who are more curious, emotionally intelligent, resilient, driven, and intelligent, will generally be better equipped to learn what is needed to perform their jobs.

3. Embrace New Opportunities: 

Seek out and volunteer for projects that push you to learn and adapt, proving your ability to evolve with changing times. Demonstrating the ability to learn new things is one of the strongest signals you can send to the world about your relevance. It sustains confidence in your ability to adapt to changing conditions, regardless of the stage of your career. 

Ask yourself “What could this uncertainty be inviting me to learn?” 

If you’re earlier in your career, volunteer to serve on projects you believe represent your company’s future, even if only as an observer. 

4. Take the chance of changing: 

The healthcare industry is vast and full of diverse roles. From clinical positions to administrative roles, the opportunities are endless. Imagine you're diversifying your company's portfolio – that's how you should approach your career. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!

• Clinical Roles: If you're in a clinical role, think about specializing or gaining skills in emerging areas like telemedicine or personalized medicine.

• Administrative and Leadership Positions: Consider branching into healthcare administration or management. These roles demand a blend of clinical knowledge and business acumen.

• Advisory Roles: Have you thought about consulting or advisory roles? These positions allow you to leverage your expertise to impact a broader spectrum of the healthcare system.

5. Let Go of Past Achievements: 

Honor past successes but focus on future contributions. For those later in their careers, some cling to past pinnacles. Often we should look at the intersection of nostalgia and relevance. Nostalgia might get you invited to share your reflections at a professional dinner, but it’s not going to get you assigned to the latest high-profile projects. Whether you have 5 years or 25 years in front of you, don’t focus on how to relive bygone successes. The more others perceive you clinging to them, the more evidence you’re serving up that your best days are indeed behind you.

6. Curb Entitlement and Focus on Contribution: 

Whether early or late in your career, maintain a commitment to contributing and helping others succeed. One potential nasty side effect of fearing our obsolescence is entitlement. 

Early-career professionals can become insistent about being given plum assignments and opportunities to shine. They may resent later-career professionals who they view as “blocking” their upward opportunities. 

By contrast, tenured professionals feel they’ve “earned” their right to be seen as important simply because of their track record. They may resent newly arriving talent as not having earned their right to take on greater challenges that are rightfully theirs. 

This conflict between legacy and potential is counterproductive. The irony is that without each other, neither younger professionals’ potential nor older professionals’ legacies are realized. 

Replace any hint of such sentiments with a genuine commitment to serving and contributing across generations. Regardless of where you are in your career, maintain a posture of humility, and graciously look for opportunities to help others shine. Some of the most important factors that keep professionals relevant at every stage of their career are having others experience them as a joy to work with, a great colleague to learn from, and someone who genuinely cares about the success of others.

7. Use your experience to develop others

Monitor your internal narratives about what you’re experiencing and pay close attention to the symptoms discussed earlier—especially unhealthy comparison, dismissiveness, or self-contempt. 

Stay focused on being curious, fascinated, and eager to learn. If you’re later in your career, find ways to use your experience to develop others. Where can you be the “senior statesperson” whose wisdom can benefit others coming behind you? Take care not to merely garner an audience with whom to share tales of past triumphs. 

Instead, develop new mentoring and teaching muscles that graciously transfer knowledge to others - and in return allow you to learn something new as well. Many companies are worried about losing institutional knowledge as seasoned professionals exit the workplace. How can you help codify your company’s most important wisdom to benefit future employees?

8. Maintain Relevance

At every stage of life, we all long to feel significant, knowing that our uniqueness matters in the world. Plenty of professionals at every career stage find ways to keep learning, adapting, and contributing. Given that truth, then, obsolescence is not an outcome, but a mindset.

Accept that your greatest relevance to the world isn’t merely having the most cutting-edge skills. Plenty of people who nobody wants to work with have those. Instead, embrace your relevance as the sum total of all the ways you can enable those around you to sustain and savor their significance. Rivet your focus there, and you’ll never have to fear obsolescence.