Choose your path at 180 days

Six months in, you have seen real work. You know which parts you enjoy, which you tolerate and which drain you. That is good information. Use it to choose what the next six months are for.

Three honest options

• Go deeper in your current area: take on harder tasks, aim for the next level of responsibility.
• Broaden out: learn an adjacent area, such as cloud for a SOC analyst or scripting for a GRC analyst.
• Change direction: if the work truly does not suit you, plan a move, ideally inside the same company first.

Questions to help you decide

1. Which tasks did you look forward to? Which did you put off?
2. Which colleagues’ work did you find most interesting?
3. What did your manager say you are good at?
4. Which skills keep appearing in adverts for the role you would want in two years?

Make a small plan

• One skill to build in the next three months.
• One project at work that would stretch you, agreed with your manager.
• One thing to stop doing, so there is time for the other two.

Rule of thumb:Talk to your manager before you talk to recruiters. Many managers would rather help you grow into a new area internally than lose you.

Whatever you choose, keep the habits that got you here: hands-on practice, writing things up and asking good questions. They work at every stage.

Write your decision down and share it with your manager, so they can point opportunities your way. A goal that only lives in your head is easy to drift away from when work gets busy. A goal your manager knows about tends to turn into projects, introductions and the occasional stretch task that moves you forward.

There is no deadline on any of this. Some people know their path at six months, others take a few years. What matters is that you choose on purpose rather than drift, and that you review the choice now and then as you learn more about the work and about yourself.