I’ve seen it hap­pen many times. Col­leagues who chal­lenge them­selves in their careers and nab a desir­able job with a sought-after title. Maybe the job is a Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er role. Per­haps it’s a Senior Tech­ni­cal Writer position.

After they set­tle into the new role and demon­strate suc­cess for some peri­od of time, they appear to stop learn­ing. It’s as if they’ve reached their goal and don’t want to push them­selves any­more. Here are two exam­ples I’ve witnessed:

• The man­ag­er who just wants to write. They love writ­ing but they’re not that keen on tech­nol­o­gy and they avoid terms like DITA and XML, even though more and more jobs require these skills.
• The tech­ni­cal writer who works for a large well-known com­pa­ny that is strug­gling finan­cial­ly. He knows the com­pa­ny is going through chal­leng­ing times but doesn’t both­er apply­ing for any jobs out­side of the firm. He feels secure and can’t be both­ered to be proac­tive. One day, senior man­age­ment decides to lay off almost every­one in the divi­sion, includ­ing the tech­ni­cal writer. He’s unem­ployed for six months because he is now com­pet­ing with all the oth­er writ­ers who were laid off. He almost exhausts his sav­ings in the process.

It’s not unique to tech­ni­cal writ­ers and man­agers. I know some­one who worked for years as a mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant. When social media became more and more preva­lent, he dis­missed it as a fad, when it actu­al­ly became a require­ment for a job. If you were an employ­er and you had to choose between an eager can­di­date who was well versed in RSS feeds, blogs, and viral mar­ket­ing and an expe­ri­enced but expen­sive mar­ket­ing per­son who was still mired in the 1990s, who would you choose?

In my opin­ion, all of these peo­ple became com­pla­cent. They stopped car­ing about learn­ing and improving.

Why do peo­ple do this? Do these exam­ples ring a bell? Why do you think that some peo­ple fall into this rut?