The only person that is responsible for your career success is you – not your family, not your friends, not your spouse, and certainly not your boss – just you. If you are unhappy with where you are from a career perspective, you need to find ways to change that and improve your career.
So many people go to work just for the salary, which is a sad truth. These people don’t consider their job as a career, but simply a means to an end. That is an understandable, yet soul-destroying, mindset. To achieve job satisfaction, you need to focus on career growth and improvement.
Sometimes people want to change, they’re positively desperate for it – but they don’t have the tools or the knowledge to make that change. This article will focus on ten ways you can drastically improve your career.
1. Set Realistic Goals
Most companies employ a tactic of setting annual reviews for their employees. These reviews are meant to assist both the employee and the employer. By reviewing your work over the last year, they can quickly identify your strengths and weaknesses.
Annual reviews are great, but they often only focus on the bigger goals, and while these are important – the smaller goals are just as important. By setting yourself smaller, realistic goals, you can ensure that you achieve the larger ones with ease.
Achieving your goals will fill you with a sense of accomplishment that can be a powerful confidence booster.
2. Leave Your Comfort Zone
Life has a funny way of providing you with ample opportunities to change – most people ignore them though and carry on with their lives as they did the day before… and the day before that. You must do one thing differently every day; this simple tip will help you expand your professional skillset.
Comfort zones are places where familiarity and mundane routine take over and destroy your chance of being different. To be different, you can’t be predictable. Challenge yourself in small ways every day until your comfort zone is a thing of the past.
3. Self-Assess
After every training match or sports game, coaches will review the plays. This task allows them to see what tactics work best and which areas need improvement. Self-assessment works the same way, but there is no way to improve your career unless you know how to.
Self-assessment affords you the ability to reflect on the processes and strategies surrounding your daily duties. By assessing your work, you will easily be able to improve your productivity and efficiency.
4. Request Regular Feedback
Self-assessment is vital – but so is feedback. Request constructive feedback from your boss regularly; this will allow you to gain insight into the quality of your work from an external source.
Often we are too hard on ourselves and set unrealistic expectations; all this does is set us up to fail dismally. Once you receive feedback regularly, find ways to implement that feedback into your daily routines to improve them.
5. Apply For a New Role
Sometimes it is not the career or industry that holds us back. Like with personal relationships, not all of our choices are a good fit. The same thing happens with companies – sometimes they just aren’t a great fit right from the start – and other times we simply outgrow them.
Hire a professional resume writer to help you bring your resume to life. Your resume is the first contact you’ll have with a new organization, and you need to make a fantastic first impression.
6. Keep Track
You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. We’ve all heard that saying, and it is uniquely true from a career perspective. You must learn to keep track of your work because that way you can see how much you’ve grown over time and how much better you’ve got at doing your job.
These records can also help you pinpoint the arrears of your job that you need to improve on. Improvement is the mother of all necessities for being content in your career.
7. Read More
Spend time every week reading something new about your industry. There will always be new technologies, and new ways of thinking, when it comes to addressing industry-specific issues. You must become a student of your industry.
You can never learn too much, and there will always be an article or a book to help you learn even more than you ever thought you could. That is how you become a master of your industry.
8. Industry Networking
Industry networking is one of the best ways to exchange best practice knowledge and stay abreast of the latest industry developments and trends. Strive to have a wide network of educated and experienced peers and stay connected to them.
Building strong relationships with industry experts and your peers will go a long way to help you to expand your career.
9. Listen and Learn
Listening allows and encourages increased engagement within your company. By becoming an active listener, your colleagues will feel as though you you’re interested in what they’re saying, and you value their input.
You would be amazed at how much this simple action will allow you to gain a new perspective and insight into your chosen career path. Employees who regularly work on their listening skills will find it easier to interpret meaning from conversations.
You must learn to listen to hear and not listen to respond.
10. Be More Confident
I know this may seem crazy, and you probably won’t believe this one, but your confidence level has a direct impact on your career. Even if you aren’t 100% confident, you need to act like you are. Confidence and conviction are two of the strongest ways to assert dominance in your field.
Choose words with positive connotations to start, it may seem like a small thing, but it is an effective way to start a mindset revolution. Fake it until you make it – works every time!