There are two more months to the end of the decade. Whether you’re working a full-time, part-time, or temp job, it’s time to make some dire changes to your career. Here are some tips on how you can make the most of your career with the rest of 2019.
1. Step Back
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It might sound strange and detrimental but it is useful. Taking a step back allows you observe the trajectory of your career and determine if you’re happy with the current path you’re on. As Steve Jobs once said, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do”. Try and take the remainder of the year to figure out if you actually appreciate your current job.
Here’s a checklist of how you can determine if your job is the right one for you:
Is your workday made up of a series of repetitive tasks?
Do you feel pigeonholed and underutilized at work?
Have you failed to gain skills to help you professionally?
Is money a motivating factor?
Taking a step back is not neccessarily a detrimental move to your professional career. In fact, many professionals who choose to take a step back in their career, claim that it is the best decision they’ve ever made. All you’re really doing is looking back to observe and understand what you’ve accomplished and learned. If you’re reluctant to do so. Just ask yourself. Are you living the life you’ve dreamed of?
2. Acknowledge Mistakes You’ve Made
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Not many people realise that a career is similar to being in school. It’s natural for us to make mistakes during the course of our career - sometimes even in the same position with the same company. We’re only human and making mistakes is how we learn. In order to succeed, we must first acknowledge the mistakes we’ve made in our career. In fact, sometimes, failure can be a good thing. Just ask Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.
When you acknowledge failure, you’re taking accountability for the mistakes you’ve done. Additionally, failure doesn’t have to be something significant. Maybe you’ve tried a new way to speed up approval processes at work and no one agreed to your method. Keep your ideas with you - maybe a different crowd might appreciate your new approval process.
3. Challenge Yourself Professionally
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Now that 2020 is inching closer towards us, it’s important to understand how your everyday habits and goals at work affect your company. Taking out a page from HRM Asia, you should challenge yourself to set goals that align with your organization’s goal.
Some questions to get you started include:
What is your company trying to be in a decade?
What are some of your organization’s goals for 2020?
What do you need to start doing to help the company achieve it’s yearly goal?
However, it is important for HR executives and supervisors need to remember that aligning employees’ professional goals with the organizations’ is a serious challenge.
3 Things Organizations Should Do to Allow Employee Goal Alignment:
Set clear company goals: In order for employees to align their personal goals with the organizations’, there has to be clear, organizational goals that exist in order to achieve company wide results.
Communicate company goals: Even if your organization has a clear company strategy and vision, without informing your staff, your employees can never move in that direction.
Remove incentives to focus on goals: Incentives and monetary bonuses might be good in the beginning. But they’re often short term goals and won’t change your employee’s behaviour. Instead, the company should shift its focuse to training and goal setting. Learn more about why monetary incentives don’t work here.
4. Communicate More
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Communication is the key to personal and career success. The quality of an organization’s internal communication says a lot about the company itself. There are countless benefits to more communication. In fact, employees who communicate more are often happier at their jobs. And happier employees are 12% more productive than usual.
Other benefits of communication include:
Improved commitment: Employees who communicate and are communicated to effectively will be able to understand what the business is trying to achieve. These employees also understand the effects of their contributions.
Better performance: Employees who understand targets, deadlines, and receive proper feedback will be able to provide better performance.
Stronger customer relationships: Keeping in touch with your customers can help strengthen your business relationship with them. However, it is your job to inititate the communication. Newsletters, online blogs, and social media are all good forms of customer communications.
5. Brush up on Soft Skills
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Your skills are what keeps you relevant. Which is why, upskilling employees is one of the major concerns most HR staff have. Keep in mind that as times change, so do the skills employers need. According to the World Economic Forum, the 10 top skills will be:
Critical thinking
Creativity
Complex problem solving
People management
Emotional intelligence
Service orientation
Negotiation
Cognitive flexibility
Judgement and decision making
Team player (co-ordinating with others)
However, these skills might not be enough to sustain you, your career, and professional development in 2020. In the words of Alvin Toffler “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Other additional skills you might need to supplement those above include:
Learning how to learn: It’s no secret that learning never stops. Since skills are constantly changing, learning how to learn. And being open to learning is a great asset.
Reading: Reading and learning go together like peas and carrots. In order to continuously learn, you must learn to read quickly and read intelligently.
Note-taking: When you take good and detailed notes, you’re able to review them at any time of the year and understand them. Good notes also allow you to pick out big, creative ideas.
Creativity: Creativity is not neccessarily reserved for those working in artsy industries (e.g. editorial, graphic design, etc). Creativity is a skill that even professionals working in the finance industry will need to survive. Being creative is what makes you think and propose out of the box solutions.
What are some other ways that you think will help you make the most out of 2019? Let us know in the comments section below!
Read More: New Year, New Me, New CV!