A career resolution is exactly what it sounds like: a resolution for your career intended to help you grow into a better professional. At Work It DAILY, we believe that you need to work on your career every day (yes, you do, in fact, need to "work it daily"). So, everyone should make a career resolution or two along with those other ambitious personal resolutions. They can be little things like learning a new skill or growing your professional network, or bigger goals like landing a promotion or getting a new job.
But how do you know what kind of career resolutions to make?
You can begin by asking yourself, "Am I where I want to be in my career?" If your answer is "no," you need to take a closer look at your career goals.
Here are five more career questions you should be asking yourself this new year to figure out how to grow your career and become the professional you know you can be.
1. Am I Proud Of My Job Title?
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You could be a janitor or a neurosurgeon, it doesn't matter. If you aren't proud of what you do for a living, there's something missing: passion and purpose.
Career burnout is real, but sometimes it's deeper than that. Our passion at 25 won't necessarily be our passion at 40. And that's okay.
When we are passionate about what we do, we are proud because we are doing what we think is important, what we love doing. We feel a sense of purpose. We are adding value to and making a difference in this crazy world—in a small, but significant way.
Every job is important. No matter what your job title is, if you aren't proud of it, and don't feel like you can leverage your strengths as a professional in the position, you should absolutely change that. Identify that one problem you want to find a solution to and go after it. What are you waiting for?
Remember, the only bad job is the one you aren't passionate about, the one that isn't allowing you to leverage your professional strengths and reach your potential.
If you don't know what your professional strengths are or what kind of work you'd find purposeful and fulfilling, we recommend taking our free career quizzes.
Take the quizzes now to learn your unique combination of professional strengths and how they can help you get better career results so you can be proud of what you do.
2. Do I Feel Secure In My Career?
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This is a bit different from job security. Actually, job security doesn't exist. Every job is temporary. Think you can stay in the same job for decades and then retire? Think again. While that may have been commonplace for past generations, today's workforce and job market are completely different than what they were a decade or two ago.
So what does it mean to feel secure in our careers? When we believe as professionals that we can add value wherever we are.
You are a business-of-one. A company won't want to invest in you if they don't know the kinds of services you provide, the kind of value you could add to the organization, and the problems you could solve for them. Here are some examples of questions that will help you determine if you're secure in your career:
- Are you adding value at your current job?
- Are you honing your skills, expanding your network, and building your personal brand?
- Do you feel confident that if you lost your job, you'd be able to find a comparable one in the same field?
- Do you feel confident you'd be able to demonstrate to potential employers how you add value?
Since every job is temporary, it's extremely important to constantly work on our careers and ask ourselves these questions frequently so we always feel secure in our businesses-of-one.
3. Will I Be Able To Achieve Wealth?
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When most people think of "wealth," they think of dollar signs and anything that you can attach a monetary value to. Our jobs help us build wealth. We're not going to tell you that money isn't important. Of course it is! It allows you to live the life you want to live. In many ways, money equals freedom.
But the truth is, there are other forms of wealth that are more important that you can't attach any monetary value to.
Real wealth comes in the form of family, friends, hobbies, experiences, knowledge, and community. If you don't have these things, money will never fill that void.
So, is your career allowing you to build this type of wealth? The intangible kind? Or are your relationships suffering because of your job? Is your work-life balance nonexistent? Do you have any time to pursue hobbies, learn, or volunteer?
Your career should never inhibit you from achieving real wealth. The best job isn't the one that pays the most. It's the one that pays the bills and gives you enough time to live, too.
4. Do I Have Any Regrets?
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Just asking ourselves this question can be difficult because maybe we don't want to know the answer. Acknowledging that you regret something in your life is the first step to making a change. Guess what? There's still time to chase your dreams!
If you do have regrets, that doesn't mean you haven't been a successful professional. That also doesn't mean you haven't had a good career. You could be the most successful person, but if you never got up the courage to start that business, make that career change, or go back to school, you'll most likely think, "What if?" for the rest of your life.
You'll never know if you don't try. Don't be afraid of failure. Life is just one big experiment, and it's your job to learn from those experiments. That's how you discover what works and what doesn't. That's how you discover what's possible.
And even if you do "fail," that's an incredibly more valuable experience than waiting out the clock on a mediocre career. So, don't give up on your dreams just yet.
5. Can I Reach My Full Potential In This Role? In This Career?
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When we feel like we have more to contribute to society, that's a sign we haven't yet reached our full potential. Do you feel like you're wasting your potential at your current job? Do you think you'd reach your full potential in another career?
Really think about what you want your professional legacy to be. It's a lot harder to get up in the morning when you don't find fulfillment in your work. When it comes time for you to retire, are you going to look back on your career and feel like you could have accomplished much, much more with those 50 years?
Everyone has unique gifts, skills, and expertise. When we focus on developing ourselves as individuals, as businesses-of-one, it's a lot easier to share those things with the world. Give yourself a chance to reach your full potential. If you haven't taken our free quizzes yet, your results will help you do just that. You may be surprised by what you can accomplish.
Before you get back into the same routine at work this year, we hope you take a few minutes to ask yourself these career questions. Listen carefully to how you answer them. You may need to make a career resolution or two.
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When you were seven years old, what did you want to be when you grew up? Believe it or not, taking this nostalgic journey back to a simpler time may be exactly what you need to begin the career defining or career transition process. Why? Because your instincts at that age while play acting, before the “shoulda, woulda, couldas” began to impact your choices (hint – someone else’s influence) are the first clues to our natural career interests and skills we must use to be happy.
When I was seven, like many of us, I wanted to be a teacher. I used to force my four year old brother to sit down at a “desk” while I doled out the assignments and used my precious blackboard to “teach” him the lesson for the day. My desire to become a teacher stuck with me through college. After I got my Bachelor’s Degree I took another year to become a certified secondary education teacher (required in California). I was 25 at the time and once I completed my course began to look for teaching jobs. Like today, jobs were not plentiful, but I also learned, while I enjoyed teaching, I did not enjoy teaching high school students. They were too close to being my peers at the time. So I gave up on teaching until I entered the Vocational/Career Counseling field at 29.
My desire for teaching never left me, however. What I realized is teaching takes many forms and does not always take place in front of a classroom. I love to lead workshops, to give talks, to lead groups, and to teach through my counseling. From age seven, the teaching is a recurring theme in everything I do.
I challenge you to really examine what you enjoyed play acting as a child and see if there is a connection today to your work-related interests. It may seem like a stretch, but if you really examine it, there is a very good chance you will see a correlation. If you do not have Career Happiness, you may want to see how far you’ve strayed from your seven year old career dreams.
In the work I do, I ask my clients to write stories about a time at any point in their lives when they accomplished something they felt good about. It could be something as simple as learning to swim to researching and executing a project that impacted thousands of people. This is one of the exercises that Richard Bolles uses in What Color Is Your Parachute. It is a timeless exercise because it provides an organic way for clients to identify skills that they enjoy using in a work or career setting.
One such story a client recently wrote was from age three.
She and her family were vacationing in Greece. She was in the ocean in an inner tube. Her parents were close by, but her father was a little farther out in the water. She did not know how to swim, but she saw her father and knew that she had to find a way to get to him. She had a problem to solve. If she kicked her feet it would propel her to move forward toward her father. When she got in the water, she didn’t have a clue how to make herself move. But by solving the problem and seeing the end result of how to get to Dad, she accomplished her goal and was rewarded with a proud smile.
Her next story was age four and the prominent skill was again problem-solving.
In deciding what skills she MUST use in her next career, her choice of stories is clear – she must use problem-solving skills to love what she does in her work. Although she had always understood this to be a skill she enjoyed, writing the stories offered additional clarification, which increased her confidence in the process.
These examples illustrate small pieces of the career design puzzle. They emphasize the need to do the inner work necessary to ultimately find a niche that will take you down the Career Happiness path.
Career choice concept image from Shutterstock
