Personal Goals Vs Earning A Living: The Working Persons Dilemma

I’m getting old, I’m already considerably older than my parents were when they bought their first house and had their first child, neither of which I’m anywhere close to attaining and both of which are things I would like to have at some point. As I become increasingly aware of my own mortality, and my body clock slowly winding down, I’m starting to want certain things from my life and from my career. To a certain degree a good number of the things are my own to achieve and will only be achieved through my personal hard work and perseverance, however, some of these are reliant on my finances and my finances are directly linked to my job and, therefore, my employer.

I have worked for my current employer for the last 8 years of my life and during that time, whilst I may not have always been a model employee (in part due to my general disregard for authority), I have been one of the most hard working, consistently performing and reliable employees in the company, a fact that is often noted by my direct superiors. Unfortunately this hasn’t seemed to make much of a difference when it’s come to career progression or getting pay rises. When I first joined the company I initially made some forward momentum, but this plateaued fairly quickly and I ended up at a dead end. Since then I have taken several lateral moves within the company, to attempt to regain some forward momentum, only to end up with a greater workload at the same salary and to discover yet another dead end.

For the last 3 years I have been working in the same role, operating under the assurance from middle/upper management that I will be getting my own team to manage and that accompanying this will be further training opportunities, a higher pay bracket and greater potential for career advancement, something that would give me the financial stability and additional income that I need to start achieving some of my goals. Seeing as none of this has materialised, and is showing no sign of doing so any time soon, has left me with a little bit of a dilemma. Do I take the secure route and persevere with my current employer, in my current role, continuing to put my goals on hold and hoping that their promises come to fruition? Or do I throw caution to the wind, risk losing it all and gaining the potential of becoming unemployed by handing in my notice and trying to find a new, better paid job?