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Women & Money: Is your job a challenge -or a chore?

You deserve to enjoy your job, to feel appreciated and challenged in it, and to be fairly compensated for your work. If that's not how things are playing out at the moment, it's time to take responsibility for your future. If any of the following scenarios ring true, it's time to make a change.

You deserve to enjoy your job, to feel appreciated and challenged in it, and to be fairly compensated for your work. If that's not how things are playing out at the moment, it's time to take responsibility for your future. If any of the following scenarios ring true, it's time to make a change.

Friday is your favorite day. If all you can think of Monday morning is how many hours until Friday - quitting time - you've got a problem. You don't have to love every minute of every working day, nor every colleague all the time - let's be real - but if your overriding approach to the workweek is dread, don't stay where you are. Especially since a normal workweek has seemingly grown from 40 hours to 50 or 60, spending all that time unhappy is unacceptable.

You're bored. If you still have 10, 20 or 30 years of work ahead of you, coasting is not an option. What seems "easy" now is actually very dangerous. Rather than growing in your career, you will stagnate. You won't get the promotions and raises you want, and you won't acquire the skills to keep professionally growing.

That will make you incredibly vulnerable. An unmotivated and lazy worker is the easiest to let go. And if you're forced out of a job where you have underachieved, it's going to be that much harder to impress future employers.

Stress is your middle name. Yes, every job comes with stress, but it's up to you to measure what your work takes out of you. If you feel incredible pressure throughout your time at the office, take your work home with you, and then can't sleep because you're wound up so tightly, you need to rethink what you're doing to yourself.

I'm all for working hard, and meeting project deadlines will always require extending yourself from time to time, but if you're constantly in work mode, you're selling yourself short. Where's your life?

You're underappreciated (and overworked). You deserve respect. If you have a boss who doesn't value your work, or your company doesn't treat its employees well, it's probably time to move on. Of course, it always makes sense to try to turn around a bad situation. Talk to your boss about how you can better work together, or look for other opportunities in the company. But please don't play martyr and suffer through a work atmosphere that makes you feel "less than."

You keep saying, "If I could do it all over, I would be a . . ."

If you're constantly thinking about doing something else with your work life, you owe it to yourself to see if you can make a go of it.

I'm not suggesting you quit your job tomorrow and go after your dream. Switching careers can take years of planning, both in terms of scoping out the new work and preparing for the financial changes the switch can entail. But it can be done. The career you start with is not necessarily the one you must end with.

While I'm all for chasing dreams, you're not to use the going-back-to-school excuse to get out of a job you dislike. Going back to school is not a career plan. Scoping out a job or industry that truly interests you, and then researching what it will take to both start and succeed in that field is a career plan. If, after all that research, it's clear that you need to go back to school, then go for it. But simply using education as a shelter from the work world is a lousy move.

Don't wait till you hit the breaking point.

Recognizing that you need a new job is the easy part. What's hard - and often paralyzing - is how to move forward. The most important step is to take responsibility for your future. Whether you're the victim of a horrid boss, office politics, or lousy industry prospects is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you're going to do to change your situation.