Guest comment: When your career runs out of fizz

Executive coach Bill Pitkeathley offers wise words on what to do when the promotions stop coming.

Most executive careers in investment banking follow a broadly similar path. You typically start your career in your early 20s, a time when you are finding out what you enjoy and hence what you are good at, and the environment in which you thrive. By around 30, you are beginning to see how good you really are in this highly pressured, competitive world. If you are a really high flier you will make director by the time you are 30 to 32. You will then have an all-consuming, financially rewarding, skewed work/life balance for a period of 10 years or so.

However, many of you who achieve exalted director (or managing director status) will plateau by your early 40s. What are the signs?

· your deal flow will not be what it was

· your creativity in finding deals will have dropped

· your appetite for the banking lifestyle will be waning

None of this is unlikely to go unnoticed by the house you work for.

What are your options? One is to go for a managerial career - subject to a suitable available position, and with all the concomitant work/life balance issues. Another is to continue in your role and make a contribution at a less intensive level. The third is to move on and do something entirely different. You have plateaued and accepted it.

Plateauing prematurely

But what of those of you who don't make director, or managing director, and who are plateaued by the age of 30 or so? Some will undoubtedly be asked to leave - you must decide whether to try again with a different bank, or to look elsewhere for your future career. You can view this with trepidation, or with excitement. I recommend the latter - the options are various. Are you going to become, for example:

· an entrepreneur - set up your own M&A boutique?

· part of a small specialist investment banking house?

· a consultant?

· an executive coach?

· a business angel?

· a non-executive director?

· a leader in the not-for-profit sector?

Or are you simply going to buy a yacht and sail around the world?

If you've reached a plateau in your 30s and are not asked to leave, you may be able to carry on as an assistant director, or vice president, for 10 years or more. Again, you have plateaued and accepted it. You are comfortable with your career, and with your lifestyle.

Whether you have made managing director or not, coming to the realisation that you will not achieve what, at 30, you expected to achieve is a painful process. But it's also hugely valuable and allows you to re-evaluate what you want from life, and possibly to move onto a second career. And that is the good news!

Bill Pitkeathley is an executive coach who has worked with clients at Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup et al. He can be contacted at bill@pitkeathley.co.uk.