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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In this career interview, an engineer shares what she has learned thus far in her 10 years in this career. If you have considered a career as an engineer, read on to learn the good, the bad, and the ugly of this woman's experiences. This is a true career interview as told to LatPro.com. This is one of many interviews with individuals in the engineering or manufacturing fields including interviews with a civil engineer and with an efficiency expert.
I am currently an engineer with a local business in my city. I help to design buildings and stores. I have been in this field for about 10 years. Three words to describe myself would be unique, outgoing, and realistic.
Being a white female has been a bit of an obstacle to overcome. Men who I work with sometimes don’t think I have the greatest ideas, but I just have to show them that I can design something that is similar or even better than them. I haven’t really been discriminated against, but I have felt ignored. You have to find people who work in the field as you and then make friends while sticking together.
My job is very simple, really. I look at empty spaces in the city whether it is land or buildings, and I work with a team on the best way to put something else there. People sometimes think that engineers operate machinery, which sometimes they do. But most of my work involves the design process.
Currently, I would rate my job as a seven. I would like to stay busier, but with business not really growing as much as we would like, that is hard to do. I do like the work I have been doing, and the more technology advances, the more options we have with creating buildings.
I would like to take my career to the next level. I would love to own my own company at some point as an engineer.
When I was younger I would always draw pictures. I guess this is how I got started in my career. I liked looking at empty buildings and thinking about what I could put in them so they would not go to waste.
The bigger the city you live in, the more work you will have. There are several places in the city I live in that needs to be redone, so we always have something to think about. However, unless the money is there to get the work done, it’s only a design.
One of the strangest things I have seen is when we were designing a building in downtown. We had to tour the old building, and while we were there, I would bet anything that there were ghosts in the building.
I go to work because I know something I do or design will make a difference. There are places in the city I live that I can look at and say that I helped build that.
One of the challenges I have had of late is the lack of funding for new buildings. If people can’t build, then you can’t get paid.
My job is not that stressful, but you do have longer hours when there is something new to work on. This does mean the money is good, so I try not to complain.
I make about $30,000 a year or more depending on the work I do. The longer you are involved in this line of work, the more money you will make.
I take about two weeks vacation during the year and I have holidays off. This is plenty for me because I like what I do. In school I took the engineering courses and got my Associates degree in Engineering. The more classes you go back to school for, the more money and better jobs there are. I would tell my friend if they are creative, then engineering is the best field for you right now. In five years I would love to own my own business in a larger city.
JustJobs.com is a job search engine that finds job listings from company career pages, other job boards, newspapers and associations. With one search, they help you find the job with your name on it. Read more » articles by this approved business partner | Click here » if you’re a business Female engineer image from Shutterstock
