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 LatPro.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.
I am a professor of paleontology at a university, teaching and researching on prehistoric life. I have studied paleontology for over twenty years now, and have worked as a professor and research for the past fifteen years. The main body of my work consists of giving lectures on the many topics within paleontology. I teach classes that cover a wide variety of subjects, from history to science.
In addition to my teaching, I also work as a researcher at the university. This work is a little more varied, consisting of various research efforts. These efforts can be as simple as reviewing the work of colleagues' or as complicated as traveling overseas to view new digs and evidence. While teaching is usually the same every year, the research always has something new for me to handle.
On a scale of one to ten, I must rate my work happiness at a nine or so. I do what I truly love, something I have been interested in since I was a child. I always found dinosaurs fascinating, and this lead to a career studying dinosaurs and other prehistoric subjects. Occasionally, classes are tedious, grading assignments or preparing notes or the like. However, I certainly cannot complain.
There are also several times when my job moves my heart and helps me to reaffirm why I do what I do. Whenever a particularly eager student goes out of the way to work with me or to learn a topic is always particularly satisfying. Also, whenever a new site is found or a new piece of evidence is confirmed as true is a hugely exciting time for paleontologists in general, but if I am personally involved in the project it is unspeakably wonderful.
Discoveries, large or small, are what make all of the work and studying worth it! The students and the research are what keep me going back to work everyday, hands down.
There are challenges, of course. One of the biggest ones always revolve around research funding. I write a good number of grant proposals and stress about the finances of certain projects. Like any scientific field, our department is completely dependent on research grants to supplement our regular budget. It is a worry that you learn to live with, however.
Despite the occasional stress of finances, my job is otherwise very free of stress. I teach around fifteen hours worth of class per week, prepare lectures and grade homework for about ten more hours, and then spend the rest of my time handling my research as I see fit. This allows me a lot of flexibility in my scheduling, and I appreciate this greatly. Because of this I am able to enjoy my life and other hobbies as I desire to, while still getting lots of work done.
Pay is not as generous in paleontology as it is in some fields, however I am satisfied given with how much I enjoy my work. With a Ph.D and my experience, you could reasonably expect a salary of between $75,000 and $90,000. Some paleontologists supplement this with consulting work in the petroleum industry and can make much more income that way.
There are other perks not necessarily related to salary, however. I do not teach classes during the summer or during the month of December due to academic holidays. I do continue my research during these times, but there is less pressure and deadlines involved. I also have the privilege of being able to cancel class if I cannot attend for whatever reason. It is frowned upon to do so regularly, but nonetheless it is an option if a personal day is needed.
To work in this field, you absolutely need a Ph.D. This is a lot of schooling, but fortunately the doctoral part of it is not unlike what you do in the job: perform research, teach some classes, and work in a university setting. You need strong writing and analytic abilities, as well as some chemistry and mathematics coursework. Depending on your subdiscipline, you may need to know a considerable amount of chemistry.
I would instruct people looking at this line of work to schedule an appointment with a professor in the paleontology department in order to learn more about the program at his or her school. I also would suggest taking a strong science and math curriculum to give one an edge in graduate school and job applications. It would be even better to minor in chemistry or mathematics; this is rarely required by a program, but it opens many opportunities for graduate school and research.
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.Paleontology career image from Shutterstock
