Some of the ways you can harm your career and your professional reputation are obvious ones: rack up a string of firings, tell off your boss or take a daily afternoon nap when you’re supposed to be working. But some less obvious things can do just as much harm to your career, if not more.
Here are five moves that people often don’t realize will hold them back until it’s too late and the damage has been done.
[See: The 10 Best Times to Switch Jobs.]
Job hopping. If your work history is littered with a slew of jobs that you left pretty quickly, and you rarely stay anywhere longer than a year or two, at some point that track record will make it hard to get hired at the jobs you want. If you keep leaving jobs that quickly, hiring managers will assume that you’ll do the same to them and will be reluctant to hire and invest in someone who will be out the door in a few years. Having a stable work history is especially a prerequisite for the most interesting, challenging jobs, which generally have lots of people applying for them.
If you have a history of job hopping, the best thing you can do for yourself long-term is to start building up some solid stays of at least three to four years so that employers can see that you’ve broken the pattern. Keep in mind that short-term internships, temporary work, contract jobs and anything else that was designed to be short-term from the beginning don’t trigger these concerns. Job hopping is about short stays at jobs that were intended to be more long-term.
Resigning without notice. If you’re ever fed up with your job and tempted to walk out and never come back, resist the temptation! Rightly or wrongly, giving two weeks of notice when you resign is considered the professional standard. Quitting without notice will burn bridges, harm your reputation and hurt your chances with other employers. You might think that you don’t care if you burn the bridge and that you can simply choose not to use this employer as a reference in the future, but reference-checkers can and do contact previous employers who aren’t on your reference list. And you never know if one of the co-workers who you left hanging when you walked out might end up at a company that you want to work for in the future.
[See: How to Quit Your Job Like a Class Act.]
Two weeks isn’t that long in the scheme of things and definitely isn’t long enough that you should sacrifice your reputation and long-term job prospects. Exceptions to this are if you need to leave immediately for health reasons, a family emergency or other extenuating reasons. In those cases, reasonable employers will understand that notice isn’t feasible.
Dating a manager or a subordinate. Most companies have policies against managers and subordinates dating, and for good reason: At best, it creates the appearance, and likely the reality, of bias and special treatment. It can mean that the subordinate’s performance isn’t assessed appropriately and the manager isn’t giving critical feedback. And most importantly, it can raise issues of coercion, consent and harassment if the subordinate worries that declining a date or wanting to break things off could affect his or her standing with the boss, future raises and overall tenure at the company. Yet despite all this, and despite widespread corporate policies against it, some managers and employees do end up dating — and when word gets out, both of their reputations are likely to be harmed by it.
Losing your temper. Everyone gets frustrated at work from time to time, but if you yell, slam doors, blow up at colleagues, or otherwise display hostile aggression or visible anger, you’re likely to quickly get a reputation that will follow you around even to future jobs. Losing your temper can be downright scary to co-workers, who may not feel comfortable around you afterwards, and witnessing that even once is likely to make people less inclined to want to work with you and hesitant to recommend you in the future.
[See: 10 Potential Pitfalls of an Office Romance.]
Taking a job that you know you won’t be good at. Sometimes people get so caught up in the quest to get a job offer that they forget to think critically about whether the job is actually one they’ll be good at. That shortsightedness can lead to doing things like trying to hide key weaknesses, bluffing about your knowledge or experience or trying to sell yourself for a role despite legitimate reservations from the hiring manager. There’s an enormous danger in doing this, because if it works, you’ll have vastly increased the chances that you’ll end up in a job that you struggle in or even get fired from. Even if you manage to muddle through, spending much time in a job that you’re just not very good at can have long-term effects on your reputation because people who knew you in that job will think of you as mediocre (which is not what you want in a reference or when you’re hoping for a connection to a job in the future). Plus, there’s an opportunity cost to spending time in a job that you’re not great at when you could have been spending that time building an excellent reputation somewhere else.
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5 Wrong Moves That Will Damage Your Career originally appeared on usnews.com
