No-one Except you is responsible for your career growth, and you need to take responsibilities for it. If you are feeling stuck in same place since eternity its time you start thinking about your career path and how you can progress in your career. Let us dive and find out what are the 10 helpful action points to improve your career.
- Get Feedback: Asking for feedback is first thing you can do to understand how you are perceived in others opinion. Secondly feedback also gives you chance to improve upon your weaknesses, and further work on your strengths. Getting feedback from people also conveys the message that you are serious about improvements in your professional career.
- Upgrade your skills: Sometimes we do not realize that our skillset has become complacent, and we needed the upgrade one century ago (kidding) but seriously we need to understand the skill needed in current time and sometimes we also need the authorization of our talent form a genuine source like a university. If you dream to acquire a place in top management then you should probably opt for that MBA degree you are thinking to get since few years now, If you dream to become lead programmer, you should get certified in upcoming technology, essentially upgrading your skills is an important pending task and you should start it As soon as possible.
- Care for People. Genuinely: Caring is considered to be a social trait, but the magic of caring unravels its true self once you experience satisfaction it brings while seeing that empathetic smile on someone’s face. Genuine care is getting rare by the day, and if someone shows, genuine care that person gets respect, instantaneously. Secondly caring also strengthen the human bonds, be it your colleague or your clients genuine care will make your relations stronger, off course stronger relationship helps you get ahead. Best part is that it does not cost anything.
- Gauge your work: It is also your duty to find out what is making you stuck at current position and for that, one must find out what and how much he/she is getting accomplished. It is not only important for your appraisal but for you to judge about where you may improve and where your efforts are getting unrecognized, often we see and believe about our accomplishments through our employers lens, but it is advisable to note down your accomplishments on your own. check what you have accomplished this year now.
- Know your industry: Another to do thing is that to be updated about your industry, this includes how your competition is moving, what is short term and long-term prospect of segments in your industry, what are the technologies that are getting introduced/implemented in industry, etc. Knowing about your industry helps you in planning and taking informed decisions about your work and your career.
- Listen More: Most leaders are good listeners first, listening carefully is a bliss, it gives you a clearer understanding and helps you analyse a proper response. If you listen more, you will have more information, more information means much informed choices.
- Network: By Network we mean meeting and forming professional relationships with people concerned your industry, this includes but not limited to clients. one misconception about networking is that you should not mingle much with your competition and I disagree, Sure, one can connect with its competition, these channels often share common industry insights, healthy discussions etc. only thing to remember is that you should not reveal confidential information of your company. Networking also helps you keep an active engagement with your industry and in long run, if done correctly establishes a professional as authority figure in their industry. Some of the networking activities you should try are,
- Creating a social media following
- Attending Workshop on Industry topics.
- Connecting with people during events, award shows, conferences etc.
- Taking participation in professional associations.
- Revisiting old Connects.
- Get Organized: Keeping a proper track of your day can help you dramatically improve your performance, improve planning & reduce stress levels. This also help to keep track of your progress towards your goals. You must setup small achievable goals, write them down with timelines and strive to achieve them as per timeline. To get organized one should archive his past work, create, and maintain a diary (schedule) and note down the planning for upcoming steps. Organized behaviour helps you to stay focused on your long-term goal and it also provide chance for course correction (if need be). Apart from suggested actions, Here are few things you may also try,
- Create a portfolio (online portfolio if possible).
- Create a daily to do list.
- Use stick-it(labels) to organize physical documents/files.
- Use Email Auto filters and folders.
- Read More, Write More: Benefits of reading is widely known, it gives you new perspective, and food for thoughts but one should also write more, Writing gives an expression to thoughts, start a blog, OR write a daily journal OR start poetry, all these writing will introduce you to new dimension of your mind.
- Take challenges: We think success as an outcome, but success lies in the process. We develop our own comfort zones and do not want to break them but remember that success is found outside of the comfort zone, if you are afraid of public speaking how can you acquire a leadership position in your company, yet we wish to that miracle to happen, and if you really want to be successful you must overcome your fears. Signup for presentations in your office if you are afraid of speaking in public. If you lack knowledge of a programming language but require that to be successful, join a class. Examples can be many, but the basic idea is to know what skill is required to be successful and then master that skill, without hesitation.
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