How to keep building a career

You just started a job, or got a promotion — so what’s next?. Career building is a continuous and iterative process. What are the small things that you should follow over time, so that you have a good chance of reaching where you want to be?

1. set career milestones — Career milestones can help you stay focused and on track for decade long goals. A healthy pivot is also essential since our interests change, or expertise, situations take us in a different direction. In any case, a near milestone helps us be intense with what we are doing. For example, for an MBA career get into a good college do well there, then get a job and work for two years to know in and outs of the workplace and pay any student debt you might have, then join a master’s program.
2. Fix skill gaps — To solve the puzzle some skill gaps needs to be filled such as learning new technologies, programming language, craft, or efficient way of doing something.
3. Learn from high achievers — It is easy to be intimidated by the people performing too good in the field. Perhaps a lawyer doing exceptionally well, a movie director who just made a block buster, or a serial entrepreneur. But, it does not have to be this way. We can focus on what worked for them and what doesn’t. Learn from it, and get back to work.
4. Stay around strong leaders — You cannot excel around a leader who does not inspire you to be good or great. They are our future selves in some way. This is what motivates us to get to work in the morning. Not someone who does not have a clarity on what they are doing.
5. Take on challenges — which push you to limits, or the topics you do not have much expertise in. Regularly take tasks and assignments that expand your boundaries, or helps you have a deep dive in a single craft, or entirely different kind of task so that you can transfer your learning from your domain to the day-to-day tasks. For example, you learned a way of note taking, learned how to script in Linux, etc.
6. Avoid overwork — Do not work outside of the office hours. It is counter-productive. It will trick you into making every waking hour into a work hour. This decreases the quality of both your work time and personal time. After the work allocate time to learning, hobbies and importantly spend a good amount of time with family members!
7. Empathy — Ability to see what the other people think, perceive as important. Being with empathy should be taken as your primary responsibility. Empathy helps build trust in the team, it builds continuity of task flow between team members. Empathy can be built by either doing tasks the other person does and listen to their side of the story, even though — you might have made up your mind. And “Epoche” — suspension of judgement, to process the gained information and think through over different situations.
8. Luck — No matter how hard we try things won’t work in our favor. Be prepared for all the work we do can goes into nothing at times. We although deeply disappointed should build enough resilience to start over may be after a sometime of mourning. Good luck.