Giving Your Career A Lift This Year
Are you feeling bored at work? Do you turn up at 9, leave at 5 and wonder what you’ve done with your day? If so you can breathe new life into your career, and improve your career prospects by following the great advice in this article.
Everybody goes through rough patches when it comes to their career. For some people, the solution involves leaving one employer and looking for new work elsewhere. For other people, it’s not so much the work as it is their attitude towards the work. And that’s something many of us fail to see.
You might feel as if you’re stuck in a rut within your current job position, but there are always new opportunities waiting for you. Your workload only has to become repetitive if you let it become repetitive. Nobody says you should only do the bare minimum.
As will be discussed in this article, you can always take the initiative and take on new challenges that your employer didn’t expect you to pursue. If you want to give your career a lift this year then you need to be brave enough to change your approach to work. Here’s some advice on doing that.
Talk To Your Boss
If you really want to improve your career this year then you should aim to get feedback from your employer. There’s the obvious benefit of learning exactly what you need to do to improve your standard of work. Instead of playing the guessing game and hoping that you’re giving it 100%, you can cut straight to the chase and ask your employer exactly what they want from you as an employee.
It’s much the same as a business improving its standard of service by asking customers what they want from the company. But you’ll also demonstrate something very important to your employer; you’ll show them that you care about your standard of work as an employee. You’ll prove that you don’t just want to do the bare minimum – you’re constantly striving to deliver a better service for the sake of the company.
That’s the sort of enthusiasm and passion that puts you in line for a future promotion. Essentially, you’ll be improving your career on all levels.
Get An Apprentice
This might seem like a strange suggestion on the surface of it, but training an apprentice is more than a selfless act. If you want to further your career than training another employee under you at the company could be a great way to do so. It’s about more than putting something good on your resume and earning brownie points with your employee.
Through training somebody else, you improve your own skills. It’s easy to enter auto-pilot mode when you’ve been working in the same job position for years; you automatically go through the motions of the daily grind without even thinking about it. However, when you have to train somebody else, it forces you to think about how your job really works so that you can pass on your knowledge and expertise. Additionally, your apprentice might suggest new ways for you to think about things. New ways of problem-solving might reignite your passion for the job.
Keep Studying
Another great way to boost your career is to study. In fact, you should never stop studying. Whilst that doesn’t mean you necessarily need to put yourself through the strain and stress of revising for endless exams as you did back in school, you should certainly aim to continue educating yourself.
Gaining additional qualifications could put you in a better position to progress onwards in your career. You could do a little research if you’re wondering what to look for in an online education program because there are so many options available for people of all ages, backgrounds, and levels of expertise.
You might already have a successful business career, but that doesn’t mean you’ve done all the learning you could possibly do. They say that we never stop learning, so you should apply that logic to your job, surely?
The best way to give your career a lift so that you can compete with the other potential candidates for those bigger roles in your company is to gain new qualifications. Better yourself and your employer will see you as a more valuable team player. Obviously, teamwork is important in that regard too, but you’ll be a better part of the team if you can contribute more to projects.
Volunteer To Take On New Projects
One of the best ways to give your career a lift is to prove that you’re willing to go above and beyond what is expected, as was briefly mentioned earlier.
If you want to impress your boss and increase your chances of getting new opportunities within your company and for your career on the whole then you should always be thinking of new ways to make an impact on your employer. Volunteering to take on challenging projects and assignments is a great way to achieve this. It’s not just about making a big statement to your manager or your boss but making your career more enjoyable for you on a personal level.
If you break up the mundane nature of your repetitive work routine then you’ll be able to find your career exciting again. You’ll also gain new skills that you wouldn’t have gained if you’d carried on doing the exact same work every day.
It’s good to switch up the nature of the projects you complete in your career because it forces you to learn new things by expanding your knowledge and expertise. Giving your career a lift is all about making yourself stand out from the crowd, and you’ll certainly do that if you’re making a visible attempt to better yourself as an individual employee, rather than simply letting yourself be another cog in the system.
With new challenges comes the promise of bigger and better things in your job role. And there’s always the possibility of that promotion on the horizon, so that should incentivize you if nothing else does.
Be As Productive As Possible
We’ve discussed many ways in which you could give your career a lift this year. You need to set yourself some objectives so as to get yourself organized and focused.
You need to talk to your employer so that you enter their field of vision and make it known that you’re trying to make a big impact on the company. You need to study, train people, and volunteer for projects that are different to the things you usually do, so as to gain new skills and, once again, impress your employer. But, at the heart of it all, you simply need to be as productive as possible. If you want to give your career a lift this year then you really just need to work at it.
As we’ve already discussed in this article, it’s so easy to become bored of doing the same job day in and out. Before you know it, you’re clocking in at 9 and out at 5 without any recollection of what you actually spent the day doing.
Whilst working automatically and doing the bare minimum is fine if you’re just trying to pick up your paycheck and keep your job, it’s not going to get you anywhere if you want your career to really progress. You might not be in a dead-end job after all; making the decision to give twice as much effort could completely change your career path this year.
The best way to improve your career is to find a way to be happy whilst doing your work. Your mental health is crucial to being productive; put yourself first, and everything else will follow. Try out our suggestions in this article, and see if it makes a difference to your future.