Choose the most suitable job and avoid professional tourism

My name is Nancy and I am a mid-level manager in a tour firm. In my career I have found it difficult to rise through the ranks to a higher position. This has demoralised me and perhaps there might be some invisible rules of success that I do not know. But the glass ceiling appears to be firmly in place here. Do I quit or wait for an opportunity to ascend?

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The invisible ceiling you talk about is so real in many companies that some people feel as though they can touch it with their hands.

For many young career people, it seems impossible to penetrate the higher ranks and different people try various methods to puncture it with variable degrees of success.

The banking industry is especially notorious, at least in Kenya, in its head hunting of mid-level managers who seem to cross from one bank to the other with great frequency.

You will sometimes hear the young men and women boast in various social gatherings that every one of their moves is vertical and never horizontal.

With each move to the next bank, they boast of new and bigger allowances.

Some will even talk of new responsibilities particularly if they involve regional or international travel.

They are often talking about their most recent trip to South Africa to handle this or that.

As far as your industry goes, the story is very similar with regard to mid-level managers moving from one chain of hotels to the next and since you fall in the broad category of the tourism industry, we shall examine it in some detail.

I would submit here that the forces that drive you to a state of apparent restlessness in the tourist trade are different from those that cause your counterparts in the banking industry to feel the same.

The classical description of a successful worker in the tourist industry is that of an outgoing, talkative, casually dressed man or woman who enjoys the company of all sorts of people and who is largely free spirited.

On an ordinary day, such a person will wake up full of energy and looking for some fun.

Such a person would fit perfectly, working as a water sports co-ordinator at a beach hotel.

For him, life is fun whether he is dealing with a school party consisting of 15 - year - olds from Nairobi or a group of wealthy Europeans in their sixties.