Key Points:
- Career consciousness is being aware of your career and the influences that affect it.
- Career conscious individuals think about what they want to achieve in their professional life and work out strategies to achieve it.
- Take ownership of your career, know your worth, and manage your brand are among the ways you can keep winning in your career.
8 Ways To Keep Winning as a Career Conscious Professional
Career consciousness is being aware of your career and the influences that affect it. Career conscious professionals think about what they want to achieve in their business life and work out strategies to achieve it, whether it be by themselves or with an executive coach. All successful business people with fruitful careers are career-conscious professionals.
As Simon North with Career Enlightenment mentions, “career conscious individuals are more likely to set their own defined career goals and accomplish them than to find their career journey dictated to them by their employers, recruitment agencies, the economy or the labor market. Career conscious professionals are also more likely to be able to foresee and deal with setbacks such as redundancy or an enforced career break, eventually turning such situations to their advantage, rather than having their entire lives ruined.”
We’ve compiled a list of the top 8 ways you can stay ahead and keep winning as a career-conscious professional.
1. Take Ownership of Your Career
The only person in charge of your professional success is you. Be conscious that you need to act and take charge of your career to get ahead. Make sure to take notice of where you are professionally and how you got there. Are your current career development and road map where you want it to be? If not, really consider where you want to be. Upon answering these questions, begin researching and strategizing on how to get there. Then you will realize you have more control than you realized.
2. Self Develop and Grow Your Skill Set
It’s imperative that you keep learning and developing as a professional. Take responsibility and make sure that you are always growing your knowledge base and abilities. Don’t wait for your company to tell you to do it or to offer you different training options or resources. Make it a daily habit to learn something new that grows a skill set or develops you into a better mentor, leader, or manager.
3. Build Strong Professional Relationships
It makes sense that the better relationships we have at work, the happier and more productive we’re going to be. Excellent working relationships have other benefits because our work is more enjoyable, and people are more likely to go along with changes that we want to implement. Also, good relationships give us the freedom to spend time on what we want instead of spending time and energy overcoming the problems associated with negative relationships.
Career conscious professionals believe that good relationships are also necessary if we hope to develop our careers. If your boss does not trust you, for example, it’s unlikely that he or she will consider you when a new position opens up. In a nutshell, we all want to work with people we’re on good terms with.
4. Know Your Worth
“Career-conscious professionals wanting to get ahead know what value they have, who in the market will value them, and what the economic worth of that value is at any time,” Simon says. If you don’t know your value, take some time to do the research. Between salary tools online, books, recruiters, surveys, and professional associations, you should not have any trouble understanding your value (learn how much construction workers make here), to your organization.
5. Manage Your Personal Brand
Career conscious professionals are always polishing their personal brand online and strengthening their network. Besides your resume, there are many other ways to be heard and seen, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Career conscious professionals today pay close attention to their social media presence and make sure accurate information is portrayed.
6. Keep an Eye On Opportunities
Keep an eye on opportunities within your organization and outside of it.
Simon suggests that “there are often opportunities for career advancement right under our nose. We need to be aware of what’s on offer within the organization that we work in. Once we know that, how do we let people know that we’re interested? It’s also worth seeing what’s on offer externally. Connect with people outside of your organization—this can be a fairly long list of people, as it includes ex-colleagues, old bosses, mentors, recruitment companies that have hired you previously, and anyone else who’s in your space and who should know you and what you do.”
In the home building industry, for example, you may want to follow a handful of residential construction recruiters just to keep a pulse on the industry.
7. Never Stop Networking
Career conscious professionals will focus their efforts on engaging with new people in their industry and, perhaps, target companies. Consider starting conversations and building relationships with those in jobs you are interested in. Even if you’re not ready to find a new job or change careers yet, having these people in your network as key references and mentors will help you in the long-run. They not only provide tips and insight, but they also act as a sounding board for ideas and could even hook you up with a job.
8. Have Clarity
There will be a handful of times in your career when you will want to make and change, but it will be up to you do decide what direction to go. Try to get as specific as you can about what you want and how you’re going to get it.
At any moment in your career, when you wish to make a change, you have to learn to go through a process of getting as specific as you can. Getting ahead is hugely correlated with your level of clarity around what you want and how you’re going to get it. Simon says, “to begin being more conscious of your career; you don’t have to take huge leaps or make drastic decisions in one day. The key is to take simple steps to begin with.”
More on How Career Conscious People Keep Winning
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