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.
Need more help with your career?
Become a member to learn how to earn more, stress less, and truly love what you do.
LinkedIn is a great way to network with other business professionals. But it does have some easily corrected problems. Of course, LinkedIn is not the king (or queen) of customer service or listening to customer requests. So they probably won’t do any of this. But they should.
1. Get a decent customer service department. I am a paid subscriber. But it can still take days and often at least a couple of reports of the same problem to even get a response. Even then, LinkedIn rarely fixes the problem. This is unacceptable for even the free service, much less the paid service.
2. Let people invite others they don’t know. If I’m at a regular networking event, I can go up to anyone and introduce myself. They have the freedom to respond or not respond with information. But LinkedIn operates on an absurd principle that you either have to know someone or be introduced to them to invite them. Why?
3. Install a simple text editor. Right now the only emphasis one can give in a comment or discussion is TO CAP IT. This is very old fashioned and not very much fun. Almost everyone now has a simple text editor. LinkedIn should, too.
4. Stop letting group members move discussions to jobs or promotions. This should be the duty of group owners and managers only. At this time, competitors can move any discussions to never-never land, namely, jobs or promotions. There is a notification, but getting a post moved back to discussions is a real pain, especially since most group owners don’t do a very good job of responding to requests. In this cut-throat business environment, why give my competitors the right to silence me (or me the right to silence them)?
5. Require a photo to be on LinkedIn. This would cut down on spammers and frauds on LinkedIn. LinkedIn should also enforce their terms of service regarding photos, namely, no logos or icons. I like to have a picture of the person with whom I’m connecting.
6. Make it easier to respond to members who write you through LinkedIn. Right now it is a real pain. Let someone who receives a LinkedIn message respond by simply hitting “respond” on their e-mail program, rather than having to sign into LinkedIn and use LinkedIn’s inadequate response mechanism. Hint: When you send a message via LinkedIn, always include your real e-mail address. If you are going to ping me, I should be trustworthy enough to be able to write you back directly.
7. Make it easier to contact LinkedIn. Not only is LinkedIn’s customer service worse than that of airlines (that’s pretty bad), but it is incredibly difficult to place a trouble ticket. This should be a “one click.” Instead, customers have to jump through hoops to send an e-mail. For those of us who are paying customers a phone number where we can actually talk to a real person would be a nice touch — so long as that real person has the information, the authority and the willingness to actually solve the problem — something LinkedIn is really abysmal at.
8. Give us something for our money. I haven’t decided whether my money that is going to LinkedIn each month is being well spent or not. I still get the same lousy customer service. I can do a bit of enhanced searching. But not much else. If we’re going to pay, let us get our money’s worth!
9. Stop making me sign in so much! I should be able to sign-in and stay signed in. As it is, every so often I have to re-enter my password. I understand this is for my “security,” but I should be able to sign-in and stay signed in on the same computer.
LinkedIn is a great tool for business. But they aren’t very responsive to the needs and desires of their customers. This is the primary attitude at LinkedIn I’d love to see changed immediately.
For more business advice, join my LinkedIn Groups, “Getting Employed,” and “Spirituality in Business.” Thanks!
John Heckers has over 30 years of successfully helping people with their careers. He has consulted to executives from Fortune 500 companies, five-person companies, and everything in-between.Photo credit: Shutterstock
