Career success is not just about luck or the number of hours you work. JCat.Work will tell you how to navigate the route to the top of the career ladder and overcome resistance along the way.
The desire to succeed at work is a normal desire for every person. The opportunity for professional growth increases interest, motivates and energizes every day. But expectations and reality do not always coincide: the long-awaited empowerment and salary increase may not come even after years of hard work. To understand the reasons for failures or accelerate professional development, it is worth analyzing your activities and the factors that promote or hinder this process.
Know how to listen to people
Try to participate as little as possible in useless conversations and do not initiate them, but participate more in constructive conversations. Listen to what the other person is telling you. Believe me, when you are silent and think about what is said, you look smarter.
You must be able to listen carefully, try to do it objectively and understand what your interlocutor wants to convey to you and why. Learn to speak when you really need to. And during the conversation, listen as if they were telling you an entertaining story.
What personal qualities will you need?
Promotion requires:
- determination;
- responsibility;
- hard work.
Self-discipline is what is needed for career growth. It will allow you to soberly assess tasks and distribute your capabilities. Punctual individuals command respect and win you over from the very first meetings. But neglect of responsibilities and failure to meet deadlines creates an exclusively negative opinion of you as an employee.
Self-PR, neat and unobtrusive, will also work to your advantage. If a person’s name is always heard, he is known and respected, most likely he will be recommended for a leadership position.
Motivate yourself to achieve to grow your career, despite all sorts of obstacles. Take failures as a new impetus for development. If you look for excuses, are reluctant to analyze and correct mistakes, you should forget about a career shift.
Know how to position yourself correctly. Know your worth. If you mindlessly do a lot of tasks for pennies, they will get used to it.
You should come to work in decent attire, with neat hair and light perfume. Appearance sometimes acts as a powerful argument in getting a position. A stylish coquette in a dress with curled curls will be more attractive to the boss if she has the same experience and knowledge as a colleague in dirty jeans with an unstyled mop of hair.
Face-to-face consultation
What are the features and advantages of face-to-face consultation?
Find out more
Skype consultation
What are the features and benefits of Skype consultations?
Find out more
Be involved
If your colleague has some insurmountable difficulty, help him cope with it and sometimes offer your help yourself. And if you don’t know how to solve a problem, help the employee find resources that will help with the solution, don’t stew in your own juice. This way you will gain the favor of other people, and also gain invaluable experience for free.
This also applies to unofficial corporate affairs: holidays, birthdays, misfortunes of colleagues. Participate, help with the organization, get people interested. Be an informal leader, but don’t get carried away - there are cases when employees become good “social activists,” but nothing more.
Making a Career Plan
To visualize your goals and determine how to achieve them, it is worth creating a career growth plan. Clearly outlined trajectories of professional growth allow you to focus on the main thing during work, motivate and allow you to evaluate your results already at intermediate stages.
To create a career plan, you only need to go through 5 steps:
- Create your “expectation”. This is a full-fledged visualization of yourself in your career after some time, optimally after 5 years.
- Determine your immediate work goals and the direction of your activities.
- Carry out diagnostics. A job analysis will help you critically evaluate which constraints need to be addressed and which strengths need to be developed.
- Make a concrete plan. It should include subgoals of already defined goals, as well as specific tasks that will achieve the desired result. It is important to indicate specific dates - open-ended planning most often remains “on paper”.
- Go to action. This may be the most difficult point, but once you start moving towards your goals, the results will not be long in coming.
Thus, for career growth, it is important not just to dream about a promotion, but to be able to correctly analyze yourself and your work, while setting realistic, but quite ambitious goals.
It should be understood that a career is built daily, in small steps, and only daily persistent ascent will help you reach the top. Find strong candidates effortlessly on JCat.Job
Read educational books
An expert can afford to be anything he wants (remember Dr. House), but a leader must be the best among equals, an open person who can listen and understand a subordinate, say “no” in time, be able to multitask and find a way out of various situations.
Therefore, you will have to read and, in order to grow faster, read a lot: psychology, motivation, management, influence, public speaking, time planning. It's not bad to read 15-20 books a year, and it's doable.
It will also be a good help to attend trainings to develop your leadership skills, trainings with a practical program are especially good. You should attend at least 2-3 trainings a year, and don’t wait until they start offering them to you.
Why do you need to develop your career?
Everyone dreams of rapid career growth and the coveted leadership position. However, in order for the plan to come true, considerable efforts will have to be made. It is worth determining why you need professional promotion. Some people are hungry for development, others want to get rich, others just want to lead a team. After identifying the main goal, it is worth understanding ,
how to build a career.
- Someone thinks that he has stayed too long in one place. You need to find out whether you want innovation in this company or want to change your activities as a whole. In both cases, you need to look for trainings, courses, exhibitions and expand your skills.
- If the goal is to earn money, never focus your consciousness on it. First of all, a high-quality task is completed - and only after that the calculation. Do projects at a high level and you will be noticed - your salary will certainly increase significantly.
Admit your mistakes
Unfortunately, we gain the most necessary knowledge and experience through our own mistakes. When we work, every failure seems to us the end of our brilliant career. In fact, these are valuable lessons that later force us to be careful about the decisions we make and the tasks we set.
Many people would do well to do this in ordinary life: moderate your own pride and importance, admit your mistakes, understand them, analyze them and don’t repeat them in the future.
Trying to protect themselves from making decisions and responsibility, employees often do not take any action or do not complete the work in full. But there is a good psychological trick: “I have the right to make mistakes, even the great ones made mistakes, what can we say about me.” Don't be afraid to make mistakes, don't be afraid to repeat your mistakes. Take action!
Never hide your own mistakes at work, even if you know that the mistake will be punished. The secret always becomes clear. It will be worse if the mistake you are hiding leads to negative consequences. Your reputation as an employee will be lost forever. It is better to report your mistake to management and suggest ways to correct it, if possible.
Infusionsoft Sales/flickr.com
How not to let yourself be broken
In order not to let yourself be broken, remember one important point: if you fully embody yourself in a certain position and are, to some extent, an irreplaceable employee, then at first the management will not advance you forward, since it is not profitable for them.
There is no need to be zealous, but at the same time we do not forget to serve our superiors in such a way as to delicately point out the mistakes of employees.
Be more proactive in telling management that you can provide insight into the entire production process. To prevent your idea from being a failure, you should not be dangerous to your own boss.
The career ladder is adventurism and perseverance, when you need to use all your own charm and ability to negotiate with other people.
Motivate people
Tell people that they can do it, that they will achieve more, and that their mistakes and failures are temporary. Discuss with them in conversations the topics of honesty, hard work, personal growth, and responsibility. Convey to them the idea that money is not always the main thing, there are other values.
Believe me, although the majority of people do not want to listen to conversations about high matters and may think that everything is just about money, you can hear something else in personal conversations. Pull people forward, no matter what, and you will receive support.
The role of education
The first and most important thing you need for career growth is education. In addition to the fact that you superficially study the basic provisions of your future field of activity, during an interview or when reviewing your resume, the HR department will definitely pay attention to this point.
Psychologist Daria Milai
Make an appointment
When applying, try to get into the highest ranked universities first. You shouldn’t go “just where”. You risk wasting 5-6 years of your life on useless skills. At the university, you can make useful contacts and even be recommended for a job by a particularly caring teacher.
Ask if there is an opportunity for additional education, attending advanced training courses, learning English, German or another foreign language.
Communication with professionals also provides invaluable knowledge. Therefore, when going to university, arm yourself with patience, adjust your memory and dare in several directions at once: specialized literature, business meetings, seminars, communication.
Responsibility in everything
Take responsibility, bear the burden, don't give up. Yes, you may be tired, but rest and move on. People like it when there is a responsible person nearby, and responsible in everything: he comes on time, gets things done, looks good, controls his emotions, does not abandon those who rely on him.
Become a guarantor of reliability in the team. You won’t even notice how you will rise above yourself – and up the career ladder.
The main thing is to be responsible for your words and actions, be consistent. This will serve you well.
Types of career growth
Successful career growth does not always occur in the classical sense of the term. Sometimes the increase may be minor and not even obvious.
Growth in an organization can be in two different directions:
- A vertical career is a traditional climb up the steps of a structural hierarchy.
- Horizontal career - expansion of the functional area of activity. In this case, new responsibilities and more complex tasks may not be associated with obtaining a position. However, empowerment usually adequately changes the rewards of the job.
In addition, there are several development options depending on the location of self-realization as a professional:
- intra-organizational career - a path within one organization;
- interorganizational career - a person goes through stages of professional growth in different companies.
At the same time, an interorganizational career can be specialized (associated with one profession) and non-specialized.
You shouldn’t get caught up in the pursuit of classic vertical promotion. Career development work can be different. Every person has many opportunities to realize themselves in other ways.
Find a mentor
To climb the career ladder well, find yourself a mentor. This could be your manager, the head of a neighboring department, or even your friend. Learn from him so that he can point out your mistakes and show you new horizons. Ask him questions about control technologies - he has much more experience than you.
You can also go even further and gain experience from your manager's manager. You will absorb knowledge like a sponge and will be able to expand your professional horizons. Don't think that no one will tell you anything: everyone is flattered when they are asked about their work, what they do and how they got there.
The path of a leader is not an easy one, since you will have to constantly leave your comfort zone, be able to make difficult decisions and take responsibility for them when everyone around you is silent. In our time, a leader becomes a disciplined person, moderately talkative, able to listen, proactive and responsible. Moreover, he can be both an introvert and an extrovert.
The good thing about being a manager is that you have to develop yourself as an individual and at the same time climb the career ladder. Remember that leaders are not born, but made.
How to beat your opponents
In the struggle for advancement, you must in any case try to become better than your opponents.
Here you can use the following tips:
- competently talk about your own arguments;
- there is no need to be afraid to talk about shortcomings;
- demonstrate how to make decisions more effectively in a given situation.
To achieve your desired goals, you must:
- constantly ask questions about unclear issues;
- in any case, obtain assistance from senior management;
- honestly point out your own shortcomings and try to correct them as quickly as possible in the future.
What is not recommended to do in the workplace so as not to ruin your career?
Here are some basic conditions for career growth.
- Be punctual. If you come to a new organization, create the impression that you know how to control what is happening. Even if you were not previously distinguished by this quality, it is worth reconsidering your foundations.
- Do not spread gossip and do not participate in conversations where colleagues, and especially management, are discussed. Even if you really want to share your impressions, keep them to yourself, there are a lot of “well-wishers” around you who are just waiting for how to convey such information to your superiors.
- Don't show off your advantage in experience or knowledge, especially if it differs greatly from the average level in the office. People tend to envy and even hate upstarts, and, accordingly, put a damper on their career prospects. Bring your potential to work.
- Keep your personal life under lock and key, try not to “coo” with your lovers on the phone in the presence of colleagues. Learn to separate personal space and work relationships.
- You need to point out the mistakes of your colleagues carefully and delicately, without showing how great you are for discovering the flaw.
- Don’t be lazy to work, gain new knowledge and skills, don’t stand still. Feel free to sign up for trainings and seminars, even if it seems that they are useless and you know everything.
And one more rule - watch your appearance. Hairstyle, clothing and physical shape are also important .
Imitate company officials
People say that if you want to become someone, you have to play your part. By this logic, if you want to become the chief executive officer (CEO) of a company, you must do the same. So how do you become a CEO? First, keep in mind that this won't be easy. After all, they have completely different responsibilities and you may not have the necessary skills, so you need helpful guidance.
This also applies to other authority figures in the company. Therefore, if you want to be a chief operating officer (COO) or chief financial officer (CFO), you must do the same thing, namely, ask for advice from the authority figures themselves.
Once you learn how each role works, you can emulate these authority figures. Think of it as preparing for the inevitable. This will also help ensure that you don't bite off more than you can chew. After all, each position will require you to have the necessary skills.
Practice proper communication
Communication is one of the most important aspects of business. It is how employees interact with each other as well as with senior management. You will find that proper communication can have many benefits, such as:
- Improving organizational practices
- Reducing errors
- Informing employees
- Consolidation of all departments
There are several ways to practice effective communication. First, you can start by actively listening to others. It will also help if there is a communication tool with clear protocols that company personnel use. In addition, communication skills can be useful when building a corporate network.
