Strategies for Overcoming Underemployment in Your Career

Underemployment is when you’re working but your work doesn’t require your full suite of skills and expertise. Your role isn’t challenging enough, so it uses your background but at a lower level than you can perform. For example, you’re given smaller clients than you can handle or an individual role when you’re ready to manage.

Underemployment also can occur when your role is too narrow, using some but not all of what you can do. For example, you’re a strong number-cruncher, and you have creative skills. However, your job only gives you access to the data and no agency on how it’s used or presented (or vice versa — you’re asked to devise promotional campaigns but aren’t included in any of the quantitative analysis).

5 Signs Of Growth (Otherwise You’re Underemployed)

When you can coast at your job without much effort, you’re underemployed. If it’s been a year and you don’t have anything to update on your resume – same responsibilities, no recent accomplishments, no new skills to list – you’re underemployed. Even if you have had a strong performance review recently, if you feel like you’re languishing, stuck or unfulfilled, you’re underemployed.

Work should challenge you – not so much that you burn out, but enough that you are growing. Let’s say that you are employed by a regional newspaper in ad sales for small businesses. Here are 5 ways you can grow within your job:

1. Learn a new skill (e.g., you start using ChatGPT when you have never used any AI tools before);
2. Improve an existing skill (e.g., you add CoPilot and/or Bard to your routine, when you have only used ChatGPT);
3. Gain new expertise (e.g., you start canvassing your customers for AI’s impact on their business and not just your work);
4. Explore a new market area (e.g., you expand from customer targets to larger businesses or to different neighborhoods);
5. Broaden your responsibilities (e.g., you coach other sales reps on use of AI).

I focused my examples on ways to incorporate AI into your career development because it’s an emerging trend. It’s not necessary (though it’s highly beneficial!) to jump on emerging trends as you steer your career development — the key is ongoing learning and development in concrete ways. If you just read the above five examples and don’t see any evidence of having grown in one or more ways like this within the past year, then you’re underemployed.

3 Ways To Get Out Of Underemployment

Underemployment is a career risk that you need to mitigate. Your skills and expertise will atrophy without continual challenge. If you sense you’re underemployed, your company might sense this too, and you could be overlooked for promotions, undervalued come decision time for raises and bonuses, or put at increased risk during restructures and layoffs. Here are three ways to get out of underemployment:

1. Ongoing learning and development is one way to stave off underemployment. Talk to your manager about stretch opportunities on-the-job. Check with your HR contact on classroom learning opportunities, in-house if your company is big enough to have a training group or tuition reimbursement for external training.. Or, build your own career advancement plan if your company can’t or won’t help.
2. A side hustle or volunteering can tap new skills and expertise you don’t use in your current job. If you like where you work – e.g. your manager is supportive, colleagues are collaborative, the company mission is something you believe in – you may want to stay where you are and fix the underemployment issue with other employment-like opportunities, such as a side hustle or volunteering. This way, you keep the good aspects of your job (and that important paycheck) but still address the bad side of underemployment.
3. Changing your job for one that gives you sufficient challenge and fulfillment is yet another way to fix the underemployment issue. If you like your company, look into a lateral move where you work somewhere else within the company – you get a new role, but maintain your tenure. If you launch a job search outside your company, remember to watch out for underemployment in your next job! Specifically target jobs that use all the skills and expertise you want to flex, and make sure the scope of responsibility for your role is large enough that you are challenged.

3 Actions To Take Now To Prevent Underemployment In Future Jobs

Even if you land a job that moves you from underemployed to fully employed (or work with your manager to improve your initial job), you still have to monitor your career on a regular basis to prevent underemployment in your future jobs:

1. Set quarterly calendar reminders to track how your job changes over time – are you still learning?
2. Update your resume (and repeat at least once year) to visually see what new developments you have to report – is your career growing?
3. Start a journaling practice to check in with yourself – what do you want now (people change!) and is my job still fulfilling?