Research sabbaticals are one way to decide on career progress
To shed insight on how to progress your career, reading research papers might help.
First, start by reading for a few months.
Then, enter a prototyping phase to build something based on what you read, and get feedback from users.
Document your failures in 2 week sprints.
Generate as many artifacts.
Try to answer a research question with each sprint.
Linus @thesephist