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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This is a true story as told to JustJobs Academy which houses career interviews and job search advice for professionals in any industry. Visit to read about how to advance your career and how to take ownership for yourself on the job.
I was the production manager for a Kansas City based business journal. I have over ten years of advertising and media relations experience.
My primary responsibility was to generate revenue through advertising sales and to create high quality ads through various mediums. My specialty was advertorials – paid interview/review/informational style articles written about a specific client as a featured special interest piece. In my opinion, the biggest misconception about print advertising is that it isn't worth the cost. Print advertising allows clients to target a specific market without wasting resources in an area not likely to be receptive to the product or service being offered.
I would give my job satisfaction a solid 10. There is nothing quite like the feeling you get when a client calls to thank you for helping increase their business. What’s even more satisfying is when that client recommends you to a new client and your own business grows as a result. The one thing I would like to see change is the economy. With so many out of work and small businesses failing all around us, people have less and less money to spend on goods and services. The job itself had so many rewards. So many times I would get a call or card from one of my clients thanking me for the work I did, telling me their business had increased significantly since their ad came out.
This job has been incredibly fulfilling for me. I have had the opportunity to work with many wonderful members of my community, pool our resources and come up with new ways to promote local businesses. I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to see a client’s business have customers lined up outside the door because of an ad I created. I have always had a passion for creative writing and just sort of stumbled onto this position by accident. Whether it was my true calling or fate, I can’t say, but I do know it has been one of the most enriching and rewarding experiences of my life.
As people lost their jobs and houses, businesses began loosing business. It wasn't long before those businesses started closing their doors. As more and more of our advertisers were going out of business, we were left scrambling to make operating costs, and in the end, had to close our doors as well. That is perhaps the most unique aspect of working as an advertising executive. You are only as strong as your economy.
One day I picked up a news journal and scanned the pages. There was only one regular writer on staff, so I sent in my resume. A day later, I was being interviewed and the following week moving into my new office. My new editor had this idea that if he combined my creative writing skills with his ability to sell advertising space, we could come up with a more effective ad campaign for our clients. It was a roaring success. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have taken a few marketing classes in college so that I had a better understanding of markets and the role economy plays on spending.
When my business is good, it’s really good, but it goes the other way, too. I think the best way to gauge a local economy is by flipping through a newspaper. If there are lots of ads, things are going well. A vast majority of our advertisers were small, local businesses and because our journal relied primarily on revenue generated from ad space, when those businesses went under, so did we. I think the biggest lesson I learned was the importance of supporting local businesses first.
Something strange I learned from on the job was that we’d recently hired a new sales executive who inadvertently sold ad space for the family section to a clinic that offered abortion services. I had also sold an advertorial to an adoption agency for that same section. I titled the article “Choose Life.” Going through the proofs, we all missed the error. A few days later, our phones were ringing off the hook and we even had several people come into the office telling us how appalled they were that we would run an abortion ad under a “Right to Life” article. Needless to say, it was a lesson to us all. People really DO look at the ads.
The most challenging aspect of selling advertising space is convincing clients they should buy ad space. More often than not, I had to give out free space just to prove it could be effective. Problem clients had me tugging on my hair a few times. Clients have a tendency to want to nitpick about every little detail. They leave little room for true creativity and limit your ability to convey the message you know from experience, works the best.
Stress levels depend entirely on deadlines. There were a few times we had to work through the night to get ads ready on time. This is, however, by no means a complaint, because that simply meant we were making more money, but it can get stressful.
My base salary was $46,000 a year with bonuses ranging from $10,000-$20,000 a year depending on ad sales. For the area that I live, my base salary provided for a comfortable living and I typically took one week of vacation every six months which was more than enough for me.
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.Advertising job image from Shutterstock
