Here are my top four tips for your career success:
1. Don’t neglect your career!
The work you do has a huge impact on your happiness. It affects, if not determines, your self-esteem, income, lifestyle, health, friendships and even your love life. Yet most people spend more time researching a holiday trip than they do their career options!
My advice – put some time and effort into managing your career direction and developing your job search skills. If you don’t know how to get help from a career counsellor or career coach.
2. Your boss won’t do if for you – LEARN HOW TO MANAGE YOUR OWN CAREER.
No one else can take responsibility for your career. It is essential that you invest some time to learn two things: first, how to discover your ideal next career move and second, how to make it happen successfully.
Career coaches, career advisors, and career consultants have all developed a lot of knowledge in this area but unfortunately it is rarely taught at school or even at university. Seek out this expert knowledge and develop your career change and job search skills.
You will need to use these skills many times in the coming years. It is now predicted we will all experience career change between 5 to 7 times in our working lives. Yes… that is careers NOT jobs! Most of us will be changing jobs at least every 2 – 3 years!
3. Remember… being good at your job is NOT the same as being good at managing your career.
Many of the retrenched people I’ve been paid thousands of dollars to help in corporate outplacement programs have been the most loyal, hard-working employees. They made the mistake of thinking that if they just did what was asked of them they would be taken care of.
Don’t just do what you’re told. Learn how to be strategic with your career and create opportunities which match your real strengths with the changing world of work so that you continue to have a future.
4. My final tip – build your career on your strengths.
Don’t worry so much about your weak areas. Successful people identify what their natural strengths are and look for careers which allow them to do what they love by using these strengths as much as possible. This means a career where you’ve cut out doing the things you don’t like – you weren’t very good at these things anyway.
Do you think high achievers like Nicole Kidman really don’t have things they’re not good at doing? They certainly do. However they’ve found their strengths and zeroed in on using them. It may sound simple but it’s true – success flows when you have a laser FOCUS on finding and applying your strengths.
These are important fundamental points. If you were a life-long friend seeking advice I would want to share these 4 tips with you. But there is more I’d also want to share…