5 Habits to Support Your Career Advancement

We all want a job where we are excited to start our week and face the day feeling calm, confident, and creative. Taking charge of our career development allows us to engage and grow. We want our careers to reflect our values, skills, strengths, and lifestyle throughout our lives. Here are career advancement tips to stay engaged, marketable, and happy at work.

Track your career accomplishments.

Write out a list of successes from the last year, and then update it throughout the year. I even recommend clients get stats on a project, process, or existing work performance when they start something new. That way, after completing a project, they can talk about the impact they had. Examples include increasing sales or engagement, streamlining processes, or improving customer satisfaction.

Even if every project doesn’t end in a glorious accomplishment, you can highlight what was accomplished or learned. Write your resume as you go and see how your strengths develop to inform potential career direction.

Spend time with people in your career you admire. 

Your value to them is your curiosity and interest. Be intentional about who you select and who can be supportive professionally or otherwise. If you want to level up, you are ready for a new challenge. The more support you have, the more you will grow.

Get a protégé to share your career knowledge.

Teaching is a great way to deepen your knowledge and builds leadership skills. You only need to be one step ahead to help someone grow. In fact, you might be able to relate better if the person you are helping is right behind you. A classic example is how graduate students can often answer questions better than professors because they were just there and understand the mindset of the undergraduate.

Set goals that motivate your career engagement.

If you don’t know what goal to set, reach out to people in your industry or on your career path who are further along to learn more. You might find some jobs are not as compelling as they are glamorous sounding. When you gain these insights into the day-to-day realities of different roles, you can determine what gaps to fill in your experience to compete at the next level.

Identify what projects you can seek out to gain new skills. For example, I had a client who managed finances for the resolutions area of the business. The client knew P&L experience would help him compete for roles with significant financial responsibility. He wouldn’t have selected this project without seeing how it could help him get to where he wanted to go. After coming up with successful solutions to save costs, he transitioned into a project management role with larger budgets and decision making power to proactively address issues.

You will grow in your career anyway. 

While some careers are positioned well to do the same type of work for your entire career, most aren’t. Just by recognizing that eventually you will want a new challenge and to avoid waiting until you become stagnant or scared, embrace that career change will come. Many people wait until they are unsatisfied or unemployed to start the process, the people who proactively accept the change to come and plan for it are in a much better position to compete well with confidence.

What has helped you excel in your career growth?

What types of conversations or tools motivate your advancement?

Are you ready to advance in your career? Book an appointment with Ursala to update your resume and stand out from the competition.