Principles for Achieving lasting Career Success
Plan for Success.
When failure is not an option, a step by step plan for advancing your career must be followed. Failing to plan your career is the same as planning to fail.
Guessing and stumbling your way through your career, is an unnecessary, expensive and time-consuming process. It reduces the chances of success by multiplying the obstacles and difficulties you have to overcome.
Don’t put your fate in luck or chance. Rather, follow a career roadmap or blueprint that can save your time and money or reduce uncertainty.
This report presents you a blueprint or roadmap for achieving your career goals! Please share it with your friends and read it for your own benefit.
Choose Your Career Wisely
Choosing a career comes with consequences that you will have to live with. It is too important a decision to make without knowing the right questions to ask or the right people to discuss your options with.
Making the wrong career choice will create frustrating challenges because you will end up lacking the technical aptitude or personality to deal with the issues you encounter.
The wrong career choice will also put you in positions / situations where you will be unable to perform or make good use of your strengths / competitive abilities.
Don’t guess when making career choices because guidance is available at the click of a mouse.
Click here to ask a question about your career and we will be glad to take care of it for you!
The Success Principles
Employers are only interested in what you can do for them. So, they monitor your effectiveness or judge you by your performance.
The best way to secure your job, your career or income is by improving your performance. Keep in mind that performance is driven by your knowledge, skills, hands-on experience and reputation.
Skills – Become the Best You
Your skill level can be assessed based on your performance at job interviews or employment tests before you are hired.
If you already have a job, your skill level is determined by how quickly you can solve problems or complete tasks assigned to you.
Your skills are not based on how long you’ve been at a job. So, beginners / entry-level professionals are able to sharpen their skills to intermediate or advanced levels even though they may have little industry experience.
Your skill is determined by the amount of relevant information you can remember or bring to bear on problems.
It’s also function of how much you know, how much you remember and how quickly you can recognize and solve the problems.
Every career has its required skills. For example; database developers are skilled at database design, database development and SQL query analysis.
Business analysts are skilled at requirements elicitation, analysis, validation or requirements management. Software developers are skilled at web, windows or mobile software application development.
Regardless of your job, you have to keep your skills sharp through constant study and practice … or they become rusty and you will be out of a job or even a career!
| Career Coaching Tip: Improve your skills through constant study and practice. |
Hands-on Experience – Learn by Doing
The mindset of employers in the Information Technology (IT) industry is that; “past performance is the best predictor of future performance“.
So employers require hands-on experience for job openings because it assures them of a candidate’s ability to perform or succeed on the job!
Lack of hands-on experience is a career killer, posing a daunting obstacle to professionals seeking promotions, jobs, or career advancement opportunities.
It’s the classic chicken-and-egg which comes first problem. You have to demonstrate hands-on experience to get hired and you can’t get hired without the required hands-on experience!
Hands-on experience cannot be gotten from textbooks or academic qualifications. Hands-on experience must be gotten by solving real business problems. You can also gain hands-on experience by working on or completing real-world projects.
Hands-on experience is not measured by your length of years in the industry. Rather, it is measured by the real-life challenges you overcome in solving problems or completing projects.
For example, it’s not enough to say that you have been a business analyst for five years. The question is, “what have you been doing for those five years?“
So, a computer programmer with one year of experience gained on a fast paced, highly challenging information technology project may have more relevant experience or be more valuable in the market than a business analyst who spends five years working on legacy projects!
| Career Coaching Tip: It’s the quality of your experience that matters and not the length! |
Reputation – stand up and be noticed
You are really only as good your word!
Do you know any skilled, experienced professionals who can’t seem to get ahead? Check their reputation.
Either they say little about their work and allow others to take credit for it or they are constantly talking the value of their work down!
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your work alone will speak for itself. Even when it does, it may be perceived to be of little to no value.
Realize that your skills are just a tool, a means to an end. So, always be assuring your team or managers about the value you create or bring to your company.
I can’t over-emphasize that being busy is not enough.
You have to tell others about the value you are creating, because your work is only as valuable as what you say it is. so, stay visible in your industry.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that being visible has no business value because visibility is valued by peers, team members and employers.
It says that you are passionate about your career and are in tune with advancements in your industry.
So, work at your reputation on the job and in your industry. Remember that doing one without the other is not enough!
A few examples of how you can create a reputation at work are:
- A business analyst may take the time to assure the stakeholders and project sponsors that the developers are working on the correct requirements.
- A software developer must take the time to describe to his team / manager the feature or functionality represented by a piece of code he / she is writing.
- A database developer must take the time to describe the impact of correct database design on a website’s response time or user experience!
| Career Coaching Tip: Protect your reputation on the job to stay employed and cultivate your reputation in the industry to get the best jobs! |
The Blueprint – Your Roadmap To Lasting Career Success
I have discussed a few of principles that are necessary for career success. Now, I am going to show you how they tie together through a short, real-life story.
Several years, ago, I stumbled on a highly effective technique for acing job interviews and advancing my career at work.
Skills & Job Interviews
Job interviews- You see, I had a job interview coming up and I practiced hard for it using practice tests. It was a first time for me, but I scored above 90% in my pre-employment screening.
Hands-on experience – Before my face-to face interview, I gained the required job experience without any formal job offer or employment by working on several carefully selected hands-on projects.
Finally, I put together my resume and attended my face to face interview for my new IT career. Not only did I get hired for that new job, big career doors opened up for me within a month.
Career advancement - Using these techniques, I quickly advanced my skills from beginner to senior level in a short period of time.
SkillsYou see, not only did I learn how to ace job interviews, I also learned how to sharpen my skill level so that I could recognize and solve problems easily and quickly.
Starting at the bottom of my professional career, I got my first promotion within a month because my skills were recent and cutting-edge! I had sharpened my skills to levels that typically take years to achieve … in six months.
Within six month of starting out on a new career, I was working on projects typically reserved for senior level talent and getting paid at that level too!
Leadership projects -The desire to keep help others succeed lead me to my first big leadership project. I started a new community for IT professionals passionate about solving problems.
I started writing articles, authoring blogs and staying visible.
Eventually, my efforts paid off and I started getting multiple job offers, bigger projects to work on and even more job satisfaction … who says you can’t get it all?
What about you? “Have you thought about your career goals and how you are going to achieve them?“
What Is The Toughest Challenge Facing Your Career?
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