1. Set yourself a goal and take small steps towards its realization
It is important to have a detailed picture of your future career and a step-by-step plan to achieve what you want. Follow the plan and assess how well you are progressing and what you will have to do next day, month, year.
Write down your career goal. Make a written plan. Identify short-, medium- and long-term goals. Describe the desired result or criteria by which you will realize that you are moving in the right direction, achieving your goals.
Here are the questions that you can use to guide your career plan:
Do you represent yourself in 3-5-10 years?
What do you do?
What company do you work for?
What position?
What is your income?
What separates you from your desired image in the future?
What steps do you need to take to be in your desired position?
How much time do you spend on this?
What are you doing today?
2. Build self-confidence, stick to the positive attitude of "I can"
Analyze your achievements, noting even the smallest successes and daily achievements. This is how you strengthen your self-confidence and self-confidence.
Learn to see lessons in every difficulty at work. What did you learn from today's difficult colleague or harmful client? What conclusion will you draw from today's mistake? By drawing conclusions and accepting a negative result as a lesson, you improve your skills and abilities.
3. Build relationships with your team
Strong and long-term relationships play an important role in building a career within the company.
Pay attention to your working communications. How often and how well do you interact with your manager and colleagues? How often do your colleagues ask for your advice, help, discussion, or working groups? How useful are you to your colleagues? How do you feel about helping others?
If the team is faced with the question of selecting a current employee for the position, which will be assessed first:
- direct supervisor: will evaluate the effectiveness, feedback from clients (external or internal), the quality and timing of feedback on goals and objectives, objectivity, relevance, reliability and redundancy of the provided information.
- managers from related departments: assess the employee's awareness, quality and frequency of communication with him/her, and usefulness for their department.
- superior manager: assesses the actual performance, ability and prospects of the employee, as he or she manifests himself or herself in the absence of the manager, feedback from the immediate supervisor and colleagues from related departments.
- colleagues: receptivity and level of empathy, willingness to come to the aid, professionalism, indifference to the needs of others.
As you can see, all these people can at any moment influence the development of your career. If you systematically build relationships with your entire working environment, if all these people will benefit from you, they will become the most loyal and reliable agents of your career development.
4. Ask for and receive adequate feedback about your work
There's nothing nicer than praise and nothing scarier or more offensive than criticism. But today your attitude to feedback should change! Learn to accept praise and criticism, because it is a critique that will be the best help for your development.
Criticism often overflows with emotions. Negative emotions. Do not give in to them. Defeat them. Do not switch to personality and open conflict. Focus your attention on the person who gives you their opinion. He took the time to tell you something he noticed. This can help you a lot.
Treat the criticism as an opportunity to learn something new. Draw constructive conclusions: what went wrong and how to fix it, what can be done differently. Admit your own mistakes and shortcomings. Thank those who give you their opinions.
If you start to criticize carefully and with respect, your relationship with colleagues and customers will improve and increase productivity.
5. Go beyond the expectations of colleagues and executives: do better, faster and more
In any task, even the smallest one, you can shine on the background of the whole team. As you do your job, try to do as well as you can. Do a little more than you're expected to do by your colleagues or supervisor. Show initiative, take on additional tasks or projects. But without fanaticism! The volume of additional tasks should not force you to live at work and to tear down the terms of the main tasks.
6. Translate problems into tasks. Look for new ways to solve common problems
Remember that your manager hired you to do the business. If you or your colleagues face a problem, the task does not move, the desired result is not achieved - you must offer your colleagues a solution! Translate the problem into the task. The problem and task are two different ways of seeing the same situation, the same difficulties.
I suggest a scheme for translating a problem into a task:
1. Admit the problem
2. Formulate the result you want to come up with
3. outline a decision or action plan
4. Start implementing the plan. The plan itself has no value. Business needs a result.
7. Start thinking strategically
What is strategic thinking? It is a thought process applied by a person in the context of success. The result is thinking about what to do or how to behave in the present to get something in the future.
When doing a job or looking for solutions, think strategically: notice the trends, analyze the cause-effect relationships, try to look at your work not as a single process, but as a puzzle in the overall picture. How does your work affect the business? On the results of your department? On the decision making of the management? What will your current actions lead to in a month, a year, three years?
Today you denied your client a 5% discount, and tomorrow he went to a competitor and placed an order for 10 times more than he wanted to order today. Did you refuse to go out over time? Don't be surprised when a manager won't meet you when trying to agree on a holiday out of turn.
Remember that all your decisions today will have an impact in the future.
8. Take responsibility
The most important thing in career development is to take responsibility for your own development. Only you know what you want to achieve and only you choose the way to achieve them.
Believe me, nobody will pull you by the ears in a new position. If you want to grow - take action. Do not wait for someone to notice you, invite you, bring you a position on a silver platter. Make a statement about yourself and your intentions. Take the initiative.
If you fail, take your time to blame the outside world and the circumstances. Analyze what you did wrong or did not do at all. Start over again. In my practice, I've seen more than one rollback to hone my skills and move back to my desired position.
9. Don't stop developing
In today's world, it is impossible to build a career without developing skills, gaining new knowledge, mastering new technologies and finding new solutions.
You need to be ready to constantly update your knowledge, get new skills and use them to offer new solutions to colleagues, managers, businesses, which will lead the company to new results, create new value for the product and bring new benefits to the client.
Do not stop in your development and your career will develop together with you.