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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In this interview about the job search process, a teacher reveals how assessing your skill-set, building relationships based on character, integrity and trust, and broadening your job search focus can lead to rewarding and well-paid work.
I am a certified teacher currently employed as a Public Safety Education Specialist with a metropolitan fire department. In this role, I develop, teach, and evaluate injury prevention education programs for all audiences and age groups. I found my current position posted on Craigslist.
In my most recent job search, I scoured through a number of job boards such as Monster, Indeed, and Career Builder but eventually found the position posted on Craigslist. I found these websites beneficial for a number of reasons.
First, they provide literally thousands of opportunities at your fingertips, which increases your chances of finding the right opportunity. Second, the ability to enter specific criteria, job skills, etc. into a search and return job descriptions that match your abilities broadens the scope of your potential. As a classroom teacher struggling to make ends meet I hadn’t considered the crossover potential of my skill set to other industries. Yet as I began to think about training and program management as a direct extension of the teaching profession, I found the confidence to look for work in other areas.
If I were interviewing for my current position with another organization, I would emphasize the breadth of work in the field of education. I have had the opportunity to engage in from the traditional role of classroom teacher, to working in public outreach with the fire department. Having both a solid foundation in teaching and experience with social marketing and project management gives me a much broader skill set than the average teacher. I would also focus on any educational or work related experiences that the typical teacher would not have.
For example, I achieved a Masters degree in Public Administration. The management and leadership skills acquired through that program would definitely set me apart from other candidates.
I think the most effective technologies for connecting and collaborating with professionals working in my field are those that are interactive and that allow you to share ideas, information, and products with many people at a distance. Social networks, email, webinars, e-learning modules are simple but effective ways to share information.
I still believe that to progress in your career or within your organization it is essential to build relationships on a human level. Demonstrating your expertise is important, but building trust and displaying character, integrity and stability are also just as important. Those types of interactions aren’t necessarily transferable through electronic media. As far as getting the foot in the door, sites such as LinkedIn can help to market your talents, accomplishments and availability.
I have had both job interviews that went well and those that were disastrous. When I interviewed for my current position, I did excellently. Since I was the “expert” being hired to specialize in an area no one else in the organization was familiar with, it was quite easy to answer the interview questions. I already had a vision of where the department could go with their public outreach and education efforts, and that impressed the committee greatly.
In a more recent interview for a Safety and Environmental Program Coordinator position that would have entailed employee training to some degree but also monitoring compliance with OSHA and EPA regulations, things did not go quite as well. I had a great grasp on the training and communication strategies that the candidate would need, however I lacked experience in other areas.
The first interview question they asked was, “What experience do you have with facilities management and fleet services?” Unfortunately, my answer was “none.” Needless to say, it was not the best way to start an interview.
From that experience, I learned to expect the unexpected and do as much homework as possible to prepare for the interview. If you can find others doing similar work, contact them and discuss their job duties and background. If possible, try to get a very broad sense of what the job may entail and do as much preparation as you can before the interview.
The most important lesson I learned from my job search experience is to never give up. You may have to apply for many positions before you get the interview and you may have to interview many times before landing the job. The market is very competitive, but eventually you will find the right match for your personality and skill set.
Also, don’t sell yourself short; some of the experiences and skills that you may have developed in previous jobs may be highly transferable in other areas. It is important to remain confident in your abilities and persistent in your efforts.
The Career Services program of the university I graduated from held a career fair for those entering the teaching field. I was hired for my first teaching job through that job fair.
Although I loved working in the classroom and helping children learn, I found it impossible to survive on a teacher’s salary. The low pay coupled with the amount of student loan debt I acquired made pursuing a teaching degree a poor financial decision.
If I were entering college as a freshman today I would do a much more thorough assessment of the earning potential of my field of study. With that being said I do love the work that I do and I feel that I am making a difference in people's lives. For that reason, the work is very rewarding.
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