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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Nothing new here: Differentiation is the key to getting a job.
No matter who you are you will have scores, perhaps hundreds, of competitors.
You have to differentiate yourself. As I have written elsewhere, you have to grab the attention of the recipient who is tired of reading boring misleading cover letters and resumes.
It’s relatively simple to do. Focus on actual accomplishments and not on self-praise. Don’t tell a hiring manager how great you are; tell them what you have actually done that speaks to the position for which you are applying.
Great! You’ve done it! How do I know? You’ve gotten the interview. Job Search 101: The purpose of the cover letter is to get the recipient to read the resume. The purpose of the resume is to get an interview. The purpose of the interview is to get the job offer.
Well, you got them to read the cover letter, and then the resume, and then they called and you are preparing for the interview. And you are doing your due diligence. Just like the three or four other candidates being considered (you beat the scores or hundreds of competitors because their cover letters were tomes and their resumes started with self-praise, both of which turned the reader off) you have memorized the company’s website. But you did more. You Googled the company. You found old press releases or interviews given to the press by the company’s leaders. And when your time came in the interview to ask questions, you asked questions about the information that you dug up on the company. Without telling them that you are a great researcher, you showed them! And they were impressed!
But that was not good enough. Because Sally or Joe did the same thing. And asked just as good questions. But you did something more. And this is the key:
What’s the one piece of information you have about the company that the company provided you with and which is key to a successful interview? The names of the people who will be interviewing you. And what did you do with that information? You wrote it down on a piece of paper and entered it into your calendar just like the competition. Big deal!
Some things are obvious. On my radio show, I interviewed Asia Bird who is an expert on LinkedIn. Her key point, what she says is the biggest mistake people on LinkedIn make, is they do not accept any and all invitations. My reaction, at the time, but not on air, was, “Duh!” Well of course you have to accept all invitations. You can’t build a network if you are not accepting invitations. Everyone knows that!
Well, duh! I was wrong. Asia was right. I have actually been to a number of events recently when LinkedIn came up. The question is always, "How many first degree contacts do you have?" If I am standing in a group, I always win since, by the end of the year, I’ll have 28,000. Then they want to know how I did it. More times than not, a few people will say, “Gee. I guess I should be accepting invitations.” Ya, think?
The same thing is true for the biggest mistake people make when preparing for an interview. And it is just as a much a “duh” moment as realizing you have to accept all invitations on LinkedIn. And here it is:
Research the people with whom you will be meeting.
People hire people they like. If two candidates are equally qualified for a position, employers will hire the individual they like the most. The person who gets hired is ALWAYS the candidate the employer thinks they will get along with. It all comes down to making a personal connection with the individual.
I am convinced I once secured an executive recruiting client because I asked the manager with whom I was meeting how she went from being an oboist to working for a non-profit that had nothing to do with music. Her co-workers did not even know that she had a musical past life. When she asked me how I knew I responded, “I am a consummate professional. I do due diligence better than anyone else. I can find out anything about anyone. I have an international network!” Of course, I had a big smile on my face so she knew I was being sarcastic. And then came the punch line, “And it’s on your LinkedIn profile.”
A career counseling client of mine told me he had discovered the owner of the company where he was interviewing had played lacrosse in college. So had my client. He used a lacrosse term in his conversation with the owner – don’t ask me what it was! – and that seemed to close the deal.
Sometimes it’s just as simple as that.
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