The new year is here, but time seems to be ticking away at a rapid pace.
And suddenly all of those nicely laid plans you had to become a new improved person are beginning to seem that little more daunting and difficult to achieve, especially those relating to your job.
Successfully progressing your professional life requires a massive amount of time, dedication and hard work.
To help you get off to a flying start, we’ve come up with four cracking career development tips.
- Improve your work-life balance
Maintaining a good work-life balance is no easy feat. There are so many factors to juggle. However, a healthy balance between the two can do you a world of good.
For example, rather than working late every night, try and head home on time more often and use your night to unwind, connect with your family and get a healthy amount of sleep. In doing so, you’ll wake up feeling refreshed and be capable of producing far better quality work.
- Set goals and objective
Setting goals is one of the most important things you do as part of your career development. Without them, you’ll struggle to find direction and motivation.
When setting goals, you should use the SMART system. In doing so, your goals will be sharp, clearly defined and easy to measure your progress against.
For each goal you set, you should also come up with objectives or steps that will help you to achieve that goal. For example, if your goal is to get a promotion within 6 months, one of your objectives might to be to volunteer to PM an upcoming company project.
- Travel
Travelling can be a great way to uncover new opportunities for growing your career.
For example, if you travel for business, you’ll be able to grow your network by connecting with fellow professionals who might have a positive impact on your career going forward.
Travelling for pleasure can help your career too, because it allows you to experience different ways of doing things, uncover new trends and clear you mind, so you can be more creative, all of which will benefit you on your career growth journey.
- Earn some qualifications
Earning a new qualification can seriously boost your career opportunities, whilst providing you with the opportunity to delve deeper into your area of expertise.
It’s therefore worth looking for training courses or better yet, enrolling on a university course and earning a formal recongised qualification. If you’re worried about fitting study around work, educational institutions such as Anglia Ruskin Distance Learning offer courses where you can complete all of your work online at the times that suit you best.
Follow these five fantastic tips and the pathway to your 2020 career development will be perfectly paved.
What are your top career development tips? Let us know in the comments section.