10 Ways That Career Conscious People Stay Ahead - CareerEnlightenment.com

Build strong relationships.People who are great at what they do, will have built up strong, long-lasting relationships with the people around them and at every stage in their careers. The importance of good relationships with your colleagues and with your boss are key since you never know when you may need them or what you may learn from each other if you keep those bonds strong.Have regular check-in sessions.In psychological terms, we need to know if we’re OK with our bosses. We want to know what they think of us and our performance and how they rate us. Therefore you need to have these check-ins with your boss on a regular basis. These sessions should be apart from the annual round of appraisals. This is something that for some people might not need to be a daily occurrence, but still needs to happen many times during a one-year period. It underpins psychological health within workplace, which is vital if we are to sustain our careers.      Keep an eye out on opportunities aroun d you.There are often opportunities for career advancement right under our nose. It’s important for us to be aware of what’s on offer within the organization that we work in. Once we know that, how do we let people know that we’re interested? It’s also worth seeing what’s on offer externally. Connect with people outside of your own organizationâ€"this can be a fairly long list of people, as it includes ex-colleagues, old bosses, mentors, recruitment companies that have hired you previously and anyone else who’s in your space and who should know you and what you do. Go on to LinkedInâ€"don’t just work on your profile but also join and participate in relevant groups. Follow interesting people on Twitter. Take part in the new social media revolution that’s creating all kinds of opening.Assess your value.At any stage of your career you have a value, a value that is predicated on your knowledge and your experience, your skills and your know-how. This value is also connect ed to a limited number of people and organizations in your life and to your availability. You also have a market value, in economic terms. Career-conscious professionals wanting to get ahead know what value they have, who in the market will value them and what the economic worth of that value is at any time.Network.We hear about networks increasingly and indeed, thanks to the social media movement, there are now more opportunities than ever for us to meet people from across the world. Networking, though, is both a science and an art. The science is knowing how you go about building appropriate networks and the art is how you build those relationships is such a way that they are predicated on interest and curiosity.Build a personal brand.This is about how you put yourself out there, to the market. It used to be that our single point of personal branding was the CV. Now, there are many other ways for us to be heard and seenâ€"LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. Control your social media pre sence and manage it so that what goes out there is what we want to say. If you don’t do that, things may be misconstrued, information can end up in the wrong place and can get out of date very fast.Stay focused and be as specific as you can.At any moment in your career when you wish to make a change, you have to learn to go through a process of getting as specific as you can. Getting ahead is hugely correlated with your level of clarity around what you want and how you’re going to get it.To begin being more conscious of your career, you don’t have to take huge leaps or make drastic decisions in one day. The key is to take simple steps to begin with. Start by taking a look at Position Ignition’s brand new Career Ignition Club, a leading career support platform with 1000s of career support tools and resources to help you take control of your career and to take it where you want to go.