There’s a reason people often stay in jobs they no longer find fulfilling – job hunting can be stressful and overly time consuming. As a senior professional, you probably already have enough on your plate balancing work and home responsibilities, so finding the time to search job sites and send in applications is a stretch. Fortunately, that’s not the only way to find new opportunities.

In fact, it often turns out that some of the best opportunities are not those you seek out, but rather those that find you. The questions is: how do you position yourself so that they do, without advertising to the whole industry and your current employer that you’re looking to make a move? Here are a few things to consider:

1. Develop your interests:

This applies to both work and leisure and the point of it is to be involved in continual learning. It also helps you to keep an outward focus and maintain a healthy perspective. Whether it’s developing your padel skills after work, or experimenting with new technology that you find fascinating, when you’re learning something new, it can help to keep you motivated.

Developing new interests also helps spark conversations with friends and colleagues and introduce you to a broader community of people. It’s an easy way to broaden your exposure to opportunities and naturally build connections without the pressure of feeling that you have to actively network.

2. Maintain a lookout:

Be open to hearing about opportunities, even if you’re not ready to move just yet. If that’s where you find yourself, just sharing opportunities with your broader network can help open doors in future. It’s not uncommon for recruiters to reach out to professionals. Instead of shutting them down, use the opportunity to connect, letting them know that you may be open to hearing about other opportunities in future.

3. Do a progression audit:

Developing your interests and keeping a lookout for new opportunities, can also help you refine what you’re really looking for when you do choose to make a move. Being able to articulate this clearly can go a long way to helping you define what career progression can look like, because it quickly eliminates what you don’t want, and what doesn’t interest you. Then, when you do happen to have a conversation with a recruiter it can streamline the process of finding you your ideal role.