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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It’s an interesting dilemma for new grads these days. Assuming you’re lucky enough to score a job, you’ll find yourself thrown into a workforce for which you’ve (probably) received little or no formal training. Sadder still, you probably won’t receive much on-the-job training either. If you work for a large corporation, my guess is they’ll send you to an off-site orientation with other new hires where you will get a condensed overview of company culture and operations. These programs are usually pretty good and you should go with the mindset of learning all you can.
However, if you start in a small business or an organization without a training program (like I did), you have to be a bit scrappier about how you acquire knowledge. Either way, there’s a few things you must understand about the workforce before you can really hit the ground running.
Let’s start with wardrobe malfunctions. At the beginning of my career, I made some choices that were regrettable to say the least. (The knee-high patent leather boots come to mind… ) In a continuation of my college mindset, I chose outfits based on what “looked cute” rather than what “looked credible,” and I paid a price for it at the time. Clients and colleagues didn’t take me seriously, so I stumbled a bit coming out of the gate. These days, however, I’m very careful about the impression I want to make and I use clothes – strategically – to reinforce that image. You should too.
Moving on from something you can control (your clothes) to something you can’t, let’s talk about how to prepare for the inevitable information overload. Ever heard of the phrase “sipping through a fire hydrant?” If not - get ready - because as a new professional, that pretty much sums up your life for the next couple months. From the location of the supply closet to the details of the Topeka Project, you are going to have A TON of information thrown at you in a very short period of time. In fact, for most of you this will be your only training. So don’t get flustered or visibly overwhelmed by the avalanche. Just expect it, hunker down, take good notes, and bring your A-game. Everyday.
Finally, The Wall Street Journal recently surveyed 479 college recruiters to discover what new grads needed to improve most these days. The result? Critical thinking skills. In a recent article, the WSJ stated new grads are being held back professionally because they “can't turn their isolated observations about a client's business into a strategy.” Right or wrong, it seems the consensus is today’s grads are adept at completing tasks, but many lack the ability to tie those tasks back to their organization’s big-picture goals.
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For advice on how to sharpen your own critical thinking, plus six other skills you’ll need to shrink the learning curve at work, I hope you’ll join me for the upcoming webinar, “7 Things Your First Boss Wants You to Know on Day One.”
We’re going to dive deep into what you’re expected to know when you show up for work on the first day… but no one ever told you until now. So if you’re a student thinking ahead to your first job or even a recent grad who feels “held back” at work, this webinar is a must-attend.
Sorry, this event already happened! Please go to our webinar page to review our upcoming FREE webinars. You can also check out our past events in the archive section.
Emily Bennington is coauthor of "Effective Immediately: How to Fit In, Stand Out, and Move Up at Your First Real Job" (Ten Speed Press, 2010). She is a contributor to The Huffington Post, Monster.com, and a frequent speaker to college students and organizations on the topic of career success. Bennington also hosts the Professional Studio 365 blog, which helps new professionals successfully navigate their first year in the workforce. She can be reached via email at ebennington@msn.com or on Twitter @EmilyBennington.The photo for this article is provided by Shutterstock.
