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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Ever considered being a sales consultant? This interview from JustJobs.com will take you through the ups and downs you can expect in the position, what it takes to land the job, what you can expect to earn and more. This sales expert suggests how to be well prepared and informed whenever one needs to deal with a new type of job interview.
I work as a sales associate for a national communication provider. I have worked for the company for the past three years, during a time of frequent change due to increased industry competition and technological changes.
While working in sales is a financially rewarding position, it is also quite stressful and the stress is probably the most common reason people leave the position. All sales consultants are responsible for achieving a monthly quota, which contributes to the overall office's sales quota.
This sales position involves selling residential customers products such as land-line service, cell phone service, internet service, satellite TV service and equipment - preferably in a package deal! I get paid a competitive base salary, commission and product bonuses.
My position is covered by a union agreement and I get excellent benefits, including a full retirement plan and comprehensive medical coverage for my entire family, which the company pays for.
I also get unlimited prepaid tuition to any school or program I enroll in, as long as I continue to advance academically.
I found this job online. I regularly searched the internet for jobs while working for another telecom company. I often searched the internet for better opportunities.
I even drove my car looking for large businesses that have corporate offices nearby, wrote down the company names found and searched them online to see if they were hiring.
Ultimately, after searching many job board websites, it was on Monster.com that I found my current job. It took about six weeks of searching before finding this job.
In addition to searching for jobs on the internet, I also researched potential employers online.
Thanks to all the information online, I was able to look up average salaries, check employers websites for the benefits they offered and read reviews from past employees.
This allowed me to compare jobs and make a decision on which company I preferred to work for, before accepting a job offer.
I also found tips and suggestions online that helped me through the application process, such as sample resumes, possible interview questions and the application process timeline.
My initial interview with my company was a 90 minute phone interview. I was mailed information about the S.T.A.R. interview method and felt pretty nervous, as this was going to be a behavioral interview.
Whether I had had one in the past, I didn't know. No previous employer mailed me information on the structure of the interview, the expectations and how to word my answers. I felt a little intimidated by such a 'formal' interview.
I further searched the internet for additional information about behavioral interviews and came up with some questions that I thought they might ask me. I wrote down answers to these questions and had these in front of me during the interview.
This was also my first phone interview. This interview went surprisingly well. By being informed about the structure of a behavioral interview, I was able to easily answer the questions.
My interviewer told me it was okay to ask for some time to think before answering, so I did when I needed to. I used the time to jot down some main points and then incorporated them into my answer.
Needless to say, I was relieved when I passed this round and went on to a live-person interview.
Recently my company was bought by another telecom company. I am thinking about moving on again.
A lot has changed since the last time I initiated a full-blown job search. One of the major changes is that the economy is currently struggling and the unemployment rate is high.
But I have a lot of resources available to me now that I didn't have before, which I hope will be useful in my job search. I use Facebook to stay in contact with co-workers or colleagues around the world.
Many people have come and gone from my company, often moving on to start their own businesses or taking higher positions with other companies. I made sure to stay in touch through Facebook. I also maintain a profile on several job board sites, such as Monster.com and a few international job search sites.
I currently do not have my profiles set to display publicly, but when I begin my job search, I will make them searchable to recruiters. I have also invested substantially in my education while working for my present employer.
When I began, I had several years of college, but no completed degree. I now have two bachelor degrees and a masters degree. I have updated my resume to incorporate my education, and the overall format of my resume has changed.
My university has an active Career Center that offers several resources that I may find useful. Right now I am particularly interested in attending some of the job search workshops they offer, going through a mock interview at their office and attending an upcoming job fair.
I also plan to email my resume to the Career Center and implement any suggestions they have for me.
Because of my advanced degree, I will be competing for higher positions this time around. I feel that I need to upgrade my job search skills and will use resources that I have available to help me with the job search process, rather than relying solely on my own efforts as I did previously.
Online job search tools image from Bigstock
