Feeling Stuck in Business Development at 48: Should I Return to Plastics or Stay the Course?

Dear All,

This is my first post. I am 48 years old and have been in the manufacturing line for the past 24 years. I am a plastics technologist with tooling and processing as my expertise. Then, on the suggestion of my friend who was with an MNC, I got an offer and joined the MNC. It was my dream to work for an MNC as I have always been with private firms. For the last 2 years, I have been with the MNC, and now I am in Business Development. I am stuck here as I feel that I am not doing justice to my position, nor am I using my experience in plastics in this field. The only skills of leadership are being used. I am pretty confused about whether I should change back to my plastics domain or continue to be in Business Development. I tried to apply back to the Plastic Industries, but my current experience is not given the required weightage. I look forward to your suggestions on what approach I should take and how I should address my current experience in my resume.

Thanks...

First and foremost, you need to make up your mind about which direction you want to move from here. When you mention you want to go back to the plastics domain, I presume you want to return to the hard-core technical line—please correct me if I am wrong.

Coming to your present experience in the MNC, you haven't mentioned the domain they are in. Your options depend a lot on this aspect/factor. There are MNCs galore in every domain. However, going by your wording, I assume it's not in the plastic domain. Then why did you make that move, just by getting overawed by the MNC tag? Now please don't get me wrong. There's a quote that would match your situation: "There are no 'rights' or 'wrongs' in nature—only consequences." Hope you get the point.

Action Plan for Your Situation

Since you have experience in both the technical line (in the plastics domain) and business development, a good direction to consider would be focusing on positions where both your technical background and business development experience will be needed—like technical sales/marketing, product support/selling, etc. This is with the presumption that you don't have any sort of dislike for the business development role/line—only a longing to return to your technical line.

Another aspect to bear in mind is that as one moves up the corporate ladder, a lot of straight-jacketing (meaning single-skilled experience) expands into a multi-skilled/disciplinary role—from the organizational perspective. Whoever fits into such a role would obviously be the 'chosen one', so to say. Gone are those days when corporates hire one person per role—the more roles a person can handle, the better for them.

While there are always exceptions—given your current state of affairs, it's best to focus on gathering experience in whatever role you find yourself in and keep looking for MNC positions in the plastic domain—or any related domains ('plastics' is such a wide ocean today... many new technologies have come into the scene)—that utilize either all or most of the skills you gathered over your vast experience.

All the best.

Regards,
TS