>To me, the most important thing, is to try to work for an organization where you are the dumbest person in the room. It might sound counter intuitive, but if you are the smartest person there, who are you going to grow from?
In my experience, this can go either way. I worked for an organization where our team were the "lowest" in rank. The end result was:
1. Everything boring gets piled onto you because those senior to you have "better things to do to earn their high salaries"
2. You don't learn much from doing boring things.
3. There are enough boring things in an organization that if you want to take on more challenging work, you'll burn out (they expect you to keep doing the boring stuff - it's mission critical).
4. They were really not interested in your growth. When you hire a janitor for your business, you do not really care about his/her career growth. If you're in the bottom rung of an organization, they may view you as the janitor.
Occasionally people did rise, after an intense amount of effort. But most learned that the smarter move was to move to a different job.
Knowing where you are in the organizational picture is important. In my bottom-of-the-rung job, I solved more challenging problems that required more advanced knowledge than I do now. Yet I get paid more than those in my previous job, and career prospects are better.
We often fall into the trap of thinking solving challenging problems equates to better pay/career. But I suspect your position in the organization is as much a factor. When I changed jobs, I was no longer at the bottom, and I got to pass boring tasks to other teams lower than me.
My advice: From a career perspective, it's usually a bad idea to be at the bottom of an org (even if you have a PhD) - no matter how interesting the work.
Also, no matter how smart you are, if you're on the bottom, people won't listen to you. Simply by being a little higher in the org chart makes people listen to you.