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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I work as a "video producer" with about 15 years experience in video editing, five years professionally. I do a lot of freelance work as a video editor, director, and producer, and a lot of that comes from the video games industry, cutting promos, interview clips, and so on.
I think there's a misunderstanding a video editor is just the guy who pieces the finished footage together. That's part of it, but it often feels more like I'm a cartoonist choosing the best moments to tell the story. I've been able to tell entirely new stories by editing together old video clips.
Editors are not just the guys who piece everything together for the writer and director. In my experience working on my own projects, I've found that editing is where the story really comes together. That's where you have final say. I can excise entire characters or loop in dialog to change the meaning of things. Just look at reality television for an example of how powerful a good editor can be. Almost none of what you're looking at on those shows actually ever happened.
The job itself is about a 10 for satisfaction, but monetarily, it's becoming more and more of a part time thing. The fact is that just about anybody can handle the software these days and you don't get hired on your technical prowess alone anymore. You need a really killer reel to find enough work to do this full time.
Film is my first love. Whether I'm putting together a short film project or cutting someone else's video, it's the art, the science of film that gets me going. I've been doing this for a long time. I used to do this with a camcorder and two VCRs back before high speed editing was made available to the general public. In fact, I'd trace this back to when I made flipbooks as a kid. I'd be doing this whether or not it paid.
If I could go back and do something differently, I think I would have approached this with a little more focus, or else I might have chosen not to do it professionally in the first place but to keep doing it as a hobby. You really need to work hard to make a living in this field.
One piece of advice I can give is this: don't deal with nitpicky clients. If they have three dozen notes for you on the first draft, they're going to have three dozen notes for you on the second draft, too, and on the third, and the fourth. Some clients refuse to be made happy or they're not sure what they want in the first place, and you can't afford to play around until they get it right.
I’ve had some strange clients, too. I've been asked to cut together a promo clip for a DVD on how to dance with your cat. The pay was fairly low, but the real reason I had to turn it down was that I couldn't watch the footage without laughing. Though, some clients just give me hours and hours of dull, boring footage that I can hardly do anything at all with. The challenge of just staying away while scanning that stuff is a real chore.
I keep doing this job because I love film. That's what keeps me going. Sometimes when I talk to someone who sees what goes into my work and really appreciates it on the level of a cinephile, I'm glad to have carved out my little niche in the world of movies and video.
Deadlines can be stressful, but this is a big part of who I am and what I love, so there's really no worry over the stress or balancing it with my life.
I never know what amount of money I'm making on video editing projects alone. One year it might be thirty thousand for a few major projects, the next it could be five grand which I supplement with other video work, writing and photography gigs.
As for vacation, I take a week off now and then. As a freelancer you don't really have vacation time, you have "work slowing down time."
Especially today, certification in the newest software can't hurt, but as long as you have a good demo reel, I find not many employers or clients really care what sort of degrees, plaques and certificates you have hanging on your office wall.
In five years, I’d like to be writing, producing and directing feature films. I have one I'm putting together on Kickstarter about an eco-friendly superhero, but you never know how those things will pan out, so in the meantime I'm happy clipping footage together and expressing myself with my own short films now and then.
This is a true story as told to DiversityJobs.com where you can find helpful career interviews and job search advice in your desired industry. Visit to find a career interview in your field today. JustJobs.com is ajob 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.Video editor job image from Shutterstock
