You probably started your career wide-eyed, ambitious, and wanting to make a difference. We all did. As the years pass by and as you’ve been working towards your professional goals, you’ve likely wondered how you can ensure long-term career success. If you’re looking for answers, read our guide on 4 strategies that will help you build long-term career success.
Table of Contents
What to expect in this article:
- The four principles of career success
- An overview of each principle
- A framework to navigate work-life harmony
4 Strategies That Help Everyone Build a Successful Career
You will find many opportunities and career choices throughout your professional life, but you need to choose wisely so you can be focused on your career path. These holistic career growth principles will help you align your career to the professional goal you’ve set.
- Create visible impact
- Build your knowledge and network
- Make others successful
- Focus on the long-term
Principle 1: Create a visible impact
A successful career is one where you’ve made an impact on people and organisations you’ve worked for. It’s a close examination of the work you do and how well you do it. You can navigate this in four steps.
- Create value: To create impact, you first have to create value. Identify what makes you the unique and valuable professional that you are. You can think about aspects like work ethic, relationships with colleagues and managers, the quality of your work, and so on.
- Showcase your value: The next step is to think about how you’re presenting yourself. Do you speak up in meetings and take initiative to make presentations? Think about how you communicate with others, how you teach and coach others, and how you take charge of your performance appraisals.
- Build influence: Once you know your value and how you make it visible, think about building influence. You can understand your influence in the workplace by strengthening your relationships with peers, colleagues, managers, and stakeholders. Gain their support to achieve your deliverables and the ability to make bigger contributions to your organisation.
- Get and take opportunities: Learn how to identify and take opportunities that accelerate your growth. This could either be through new roles with a larger portfolio or by continuously building your profile within your organization. Regularly keep up with trends in the job market to find your dream job.
Principle 2: Build your knowledge and network
Successful professionals continuously grow and learn. They always choose a career path and keep an eye on their progress. Not only does this keep the mind active and deepen your expertise, but it also allows you to take a more passionate approach to your career.
- Build your skills: Pay close attention to your learning curve and regularly evaluate it to make improvements. A few years into the workforce, you may discover that you want to pick up new skills to make your profile more well-rounded. We say, go for it! On a less technical side, learn to take feedback about what you can improve and how you can collaborate better.
- Grow your network: Your professional network can be the singular difference between a dynamic career and one where you just move along. You can begin by building a network of supporters and allies within your organisation. You can also connect with other professionals who you admire or want to work with. Over time, this will become a network of champions across a variety of organisations, geographies, and even industries!
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Principle 3: Make others successful
Just as you expect your network to root for you, extend the same support to your colleagues and peers. How does your work contribute to the success of your organization and coworkers?
If you’re a team manager, this translates into the way you work with and support your team. This covers aspects like hiring, delegation, building trust, training, and development, providing constructive feedback, workload management, and so on.
This also translates into how your work and efficiency help your colleagues achieve their deliverables. This is seen through things like the way you set a vision and direction, your role in the organizational chart, how you provide resources and support, whether you give your team members due credit and recognition, and even how you manage interpersonal conflicts.
To put it in a shorter way, be sincere. When you put your best foot forward, it’s always going to have a positive impact on your colleagues — at least in the long run.
Principle 4: Focus on the long-term
All the effort you put into career growth and acceleration will be for nothing if you don’t think about its long-term impact. If you’ve been in the workforce for some time, you might have already started thinking about this. What is it all for? What’s the purpose of what you are doing? What drives you to continue working? What does your work mean in the long run?
Thinking about the impact and purpose of your work isn’t always that easy. These are abstract questions and maybe you don’t have the answers just yet. But it’s definitely worth navigating these questions from the early stages in your career so you can make conscious and intentional decisions along the way.
When you think about your career, in the long run, think about how you can build a successful career because it takes lots of time, effort, and patience. It’s been said and we’ll say it again — don’t forget to take care of yourself!
Ikigai: Finding work-life balance
Since we’re on the subject of finding purpose and how difficult that can be, here’s an excellent framework that will help you evaluate how to integrate the harmony between life and work.
What we love about Ikigai is that it’s a simple yet comprehensive idea that seamlessly marries passion and realistic goals. It represents a balance that almost all of us yearn for in our lives: the quest of finding joy and fulfilment. Ikigai tells us that you can have it all!
Building a successful career takes time, effort, and patience. So always start with setting goals for yourself and then work hard to achieve them. We have described to you the 4 working strategies that will give you enough boosts to improve your career.
Do you want to know more about the four engines of career success? Head over to this podcast episode, where Amit Ray (host, founder of CrazyTok) shares more about how to grow your career.
