Is your body or mind telling you enough is enough? If you are unhappy in your current job, it can often manifest as physical or emotional exhaustion, sometimes even both. If you’ve begun experiencing signs of depression or emotional exhaustion, you’ll want to make a change quickly. Especially if your stress levels are starting to take a physical toll on you. Before changing jobs all together, you may want to speak to your current employer about your stress levels and what changes to the environment could alleviate this. Ask yourself these questions to understand if this is what you could be experiencing:

• Do you get a lot of headaches or body aches?
• Are you always exhausted?
• At the end of each workday, do you feel drained?
• Are you struggling to concentrate?
• Are you able to effectively manage stressful situations at work or are you reacting badly? Could your reactions be having a negative impact on your relationships in the workplace?

The boredom of your work can lead to apathy in the workplace, feeling unfulfilled and emotionally and physically drained. Perhaps you feel as though the work you’re doing daily doesn’t matter, then of course you’re not going to want to put in the extra effort. What are your answers to the below questions?

• Do you often not participate in work meetings because you just don’t care?
• Do you find yourself mind-numbingly working through tasks more often than not?
• When was the last time something at work got you excited?

It’s a natural progression for employees who have worked in the same position to outgrow their job. It’s when you find yourself not progressing or not being challenged by your daily work anymore that you need to evaluate whether there is room in your current company to grow.

• Do you feel that you’ve grown in the last year?
• Is there room for you to progress within the company?
• Are you hitting your KPI’s with no talk of career changes within your current company?

It seems like an obvious place to start but create your ideal dream job. What is it that you’re really interested in? Do you have transferable skills that you can carry over? What does your ideal job look like and entail?

Now that you have an idea of what you want from your career, it’s time to build the skills for it. You should look at it this way: Do I need to upskill, or do I need to totally re-skill? Upskilling means refining or advancing a skill set you already have. Re-skilling means you need to develop new skills all together.

Once you establish this, you’ll know exactly what it’s going to take for you to make a career change. There are so many options out there to further your education, short courses can help you build a specialised skillset through focused learning paths and qualifications will help you build a broader body of knowledge and skills. You can take a short course over a number of weeks or months; in contrast a qualification will take you anywhere from 12 months to a number of years. Map out what you need to build the right skill set and set a time frame.

A mentor is an incredibly helpful asset when looking to change careers . LinkedIn has the option to find mentors in the field of work that you’re interested in. Alternatively, there are plenty of websites that allow you to get in touch with industry leaders who may extend a helping hand on your new career venture. This is also a great time to begin networking and seeing what opportunities are out there.

Take some time to reflect on how far you’ve already come in your career by enhancing your CV or portfolio. Make sure you are highlighting skills that you can transfer into your desired industry. Take the time to highlight any big career achievements over the years, perhaps you got a promotion or won an award at your current employer? Make sure to highlight this!