# Deciding how to progress your career and find work you find interesting/challenging.

DevFeed: [Deciding how to progress your career and find work you find interesting/challenging.](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/deciding-how-to-progress-your-career-and-find-work-you-find-interesting-challenging-30763.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://blog.vanillajava.blog/2026/09/deciding-how-to-progress-your-career.html>)

Author: Peter Lawrey (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2026-09-12T07:32:17Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Vanilla Java](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/vanilla-java.md>)

Topics: [Job](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/job.md>), [Learning](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/learning.md>), [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [career](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/career.md>), [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [job](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/job.md>), [learning](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/learning.md>), [opinion](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/opinion.md>), [work](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/work.md>)

## AI overview

An opinion article about progressing in a career by creating growth opportunities within a current role. It recommends teaching others, understanding users and systems, improving quality and efficiency, taking responsibility for outcomes, and focusing on work that AI cannot easily automate.

## Source excerpt

When you start a new role, many challenges are placed on you. Once you have been in a role for a while, you may feel like you aren't learning as much, your career isn't progressing, and you wonder what job you might move to next. Having been in that situation many times, my suggestion is that rather than waiting to be given challenges or the next role, you take the opportunity to challenge yourself to grow in your current role. This doesn't mean accepting a role with too little growth, but rather see if there are opportunities to grow while you have some capacity, if you drive them. For example, imagine the roles you would wish to have, how much of that could you be doing now without being asked, possibly in your own time? I am not suggesting doing more unpaid work, rather extending the work you have to benefit your career. Ways to extend your current role to help you grow Teach others. Often, you don't really understand something until you have had to explain it to someone else. Understand the people using your work. Broaden your understanding of the people or systems using what you are producing. How can what you're doing be more efficient, high-quality, more valuable to the end users, and easier to maintain? Take responsibility for a larger part of an outcome. Instead of only producing a piece of work, help define what success means, consider alternatives, check whether it works in practice and learn from what happens afterwards. Say you are working heavily with AI. Explore all the ways it currently fails, rather than sticking to what it does safely. Anything AI does easily now will be increasingly automated, and there probably isn't a future in that. Instead, focus on what AI can't do and where you add value. That is likely to be in demand. Consider two approaches to using AI to write for illustration: 2,000 words of content on a subject (or 200 lines of code @ ~10 words per line). You could prompt it for an answer of about 2,500 words and then edit out anything