This practice is known as career development and it’s essentially the process of choosing a career, enhance your skills and advancing along as you keep on learning. It’s a long-term process of self-knowledge, exploration, learning and decision-making that improves your abilities, shapes your career and takes you closer to your ideal and desired job position and lifestyle.
While being all hands on deck is the best way to learn, some things go further than the more practical sides of performing well and being good at your job.
You might have heard about soft and hard skills. On one side, hard skills are those teachable and quantifiable abilities or skill sets that someone has. Proficiency in a foreign language, computer, sales or marketing skills, photography, programming and a degree or diploma are just some examples of hard skills.
On the other side, soft skills are subjective skills that often relate to the way one interacts and relates with other people. They are much harder to quantify, but that doesn’t make them any less valid, in fact, soft skills are precious abilities and know-hows that can set one professional apart from another one and make or break a great leader.
If you want to take the next step and give your career a boost we are going to share some tips and tricks that you can adapt to your work-life (and personal life) to continue thriving and aim high for your desired position, job title and lifestyle.
Set a goal (or goals) and design a plan to achieve them
It’s important to have a career goal but you will not get there from day to night so it’s essential to set smaller objectives that will eventually lead you to your target. See it as when you start a new project and you create tasks and subtasks related to it. Each completed subtask will ultimately lead to completing the parent task. That’s the way to go; small and steady steps. Once the list is done it’s time to design a plan to reach our goals. Setting up a timeline is a good practice because it puts a little bit of healthy pressure on you to follow the plan. At the same time, it’s also important to point out that career development is not a competition; take your time to actually learn about new things and yourself. You set the finish line.
Find a mentor
Finding someone to look up to is probably one of the best ways to gain experience to advance in your career. It can be your former or current boss, a co-worker or a friend of yours. Learn from them, ask to point out your weak points or mistakes and how to turn the tables to do better.
Finding someone of your close circle isn’t the only way to find a mentor; in fact, you can learn from people that you don’t even know. With the power of social media, and especially platforms like Linkedin and Instagram, but also fresher apps like TikTok, and the secretive Clubhouse, can be places where to find professionals and leaders to look up to.
Read, listen and watch more
Don’t limit your learning to only a specific channel or format. There’s endless content out there to learn from; bookmark online articles (and actually read them afterwards), download podcasts to listen to while you commute and watch a TV show, documentary or interview to disconnect after a long day at work. You never know where and when you might get a new piece of knowledge to help you develop a new set of skills or even help you start to build a new project that can grow into something big later on.
Expand your set of skills
You might think that excelling at excel (pun intended) might not be needed for your field of work. That’s where you’re wrong! Any skill or ability is good regardless of your field of work.
You can potentially attain the skills you currently lack in a workshop, online course or even a post-graduate programme if you want to take a deep dive on a specific subject.
There are thousands of options of online and in-person courses out there that can help you develop and attain the professional skills to thrive in your current position and take a step closer to your dream job.
Maintain a good work-life balance
The best professional or entrepreneur is not the one that puts on 15 hours of work a day and preaches about working late. While there are days that putting in extra hours might be needed, don’t let it become a recurrent thing. A healthy work-life balance is one of the most important aspects of any professional. Those who take time to disconnect and spend time away from work turn out to be more efficient, creative and happier.
Last but not least, career development should be a slow and steady process; it’s all about growing and understanding that it takes time, but every step of the process is important to reach the top. We hope that these few tips help you craft a plan to reach your dream workplace or position. Best of luck!
A good place to start if you feel your tech career has frozen is finding a Talent Agent. There is nothing wrong with wanting to take matters into your own hands, but an extra hand could give you knowledgeable insights on the tech industry and help you take advantage of your strenghts to boost your career. Check out the three products we offer to shape your future.
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