Leanna Cruz Editorial Director At the start of your career, chances are you had career goals in mind, possibly with help and advice from a career adviser. Your plan may have included reaching a particular position, such as an upper management position or partnership by a certain year. Essential to reaching those goals is a [...]
You are in the driver’s seat of your career advancement. You will need to take action, work hard and demonstrate success, but you will also need to get yourself noticed. If you do not stand out in the crowd of coworkers around you, it will be much harder to get that promotion that you want. Here are some simple ways to get noticed at work.
The moment that you start your new job, your career development begins. If you have aspirations to advance your career, then you need to start thinking about that immediately and begin to build a resume that will take you toward your career goal and reflect your ambitions. Use your resume as a career development guide, as a self-assessment to keep you focused on your career goals.
If your career advancement has stalled it may be worth some of your time to identify the roadblocks. Frequently, those roadblocks are things that you are doing or not doing, but the biggest problem may be that you do not even know what they are.
It is the short term goals that demonstrate your ability, improve your skills, improve your knowledge, help you to gain the required experience and demonstrate the many successes you are capable of achieving. It is the short term goals that will maintain your motivation and focus to continue toward your longer term goal. These are the goals that provide immediate gratification once achieved. These are the goals that are the barometer for your career development plan.
If you listen to the continuous pessimist reports about slow job growth you may think that the best way to develop your career will be to always say yes when you are offered and assignment. You’ll even find career advice to suggest this strategy. However, this is a career strategy that could slow your career advancement. In fact, the best career advice on this issue is to know when you need to say no and pass on the assignment.
During times of change you will discover opportunities for career advancement. These are only three strategies to lead you to them.
Tell me about yourself seems like a vague statement, but not being able to answer means you don’t know how you can help the department reach its goals and that you can’t handle ambiguity, and in times of constant change as we are experiencing currently, you will face ambiguity.
You know that networking is necessary for career advancement. You’ve heard more than once that it’s not only what you know it’s who knows you. Relationships are vital to success and the key to developing relationships critical to career success is to hone your networking skills and expand your network.
Asking doesn’t come easy for most. But if you don’t ask for want you want you won’t get what you want. To avoid having to ask we convince ourselves that we shouldn’t have too, believing that our work speaks for itself and that we should be rewarded for our effort. Or we believe that we have sufficiently hinted about our desires, but become frustrated and disappointed about being overlooked or ignored when career advancement opportunities arise. You must be visible and vocal to experience the career success you deserve.
