Rethink Your Future
1. Take charge of your career development.
Accept responsibility for your education, self-coaching and learning. A Fortune 500 survey noted that the No.1 trait CEOs look for in a recruit is “responsibility for one’s own learning” — not waiting for the company or boss to schedule, pay or orchestrate training.
2. Determine what you do best and find opportunities to shine in those areas.
Start with your skills, do an honest appraisal of your talents and abilities. Lily Tomlin underscores this point: “I always knew I wanted to be somebody. I didn’t know I had to be so specific.” Revise your job description and resume. Add assertive phraseology.
3. Be clear on your values, your passions and your beliefs.
To experience true career success, you must align your professional goals with your personal goals. If these are conflicted, you will be too! Lily Tomlin said about bringing clarity to career issues: “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you’re still a rat.” Decide what you really want out of life and coach yourself in that direction.
4. Be vigilant and consistent in managing your career.
Clarify your driving theme, where you want to excel. Cause your achievements to consistently highlight your unique excellence. Add certifications to your personal records.
5. Develop a reputation for getting the job done.
Figure out what needs to be done and rethink how to make it happen. Know what you want and gather alternative solutions from every encounter. Use project management tools and software to better manage your performance.
6. Consider job changes and career moves that will best highlight your talents and abilities.
When making a job move or career change, be clear on what you do well and apply those skills to a broad range of businesses and industries in order to choose the best fit. Consider how to redefine your current job.
7. Become proficient in several areas of knowledge – not just one.
The more you know, the more valuable an asset you are to an organization. Continually develop new ways to open your mind to alternatives. Think sideways and laterally with regard to additional abilities. The adage, that’s not my job may have been a career downfall throughout history; today it has
absolutely no relevancy.
8. Choose projects and jobs that are a good match with your overall career plan.
Pick your jobs and projects to develop and use skills that match your beliefs. See each move, every team project as an opportunity to further develop your career life plan.
9. Understand that the right boss is often more important than the right job.
See the person to whom you report as the greatest factor in your career success. What can he or she teach you? How can he or she support your growth? How can he or she tutor your skill progression?
10. Be alert to coworker synergy when deciding whether to take on a project or job.
What are they doing, how creative, innovative and open are they? How successful are they? How capable are they of continuing success? Employment studies consistently show that between 85 and 92% of the reasons people don’t succeed in a job is because of “fit.”
11. Rethink employment: Don’t take a job or project, make it.
Solve the right problems and create opportunities. Reshape your job with the direction of the company, the customer, your goals.
12. Sharpen your negotiating skills.
Develop core competencies in knowing clearly what you want before asking. Figure out who the other person is, his or her goals, interests, pressures and authority. Clarify your strengths and benefits and present them loudly. Handle confrontation in easy-to-understand win-win situations. Learn how to manage people.
13. Make continual learning your number one priority.
Remember: no risks, no rewards.
14. Vow never to grow bored.
Learn to juggle. Never get stale. Make your life different every day whether it is a different person you discuss an issue with, someone different to have lunch with, a new analysis tool, a different point of view to argue, a different route to work, a magazine you hadn’t read, a different Web site to visit, welcome change.
15. Recognize that it’s never, ever, too late to change and grow.
Change brings success, in both our personal and our professional life. As the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We aren’t what we ought to be, we aren’t what we should be, we aren’t even what we could be, but thank God we’re not what we were.”