You’ll spend over 100,000 hours at work in your lifetime, yet most of us fail to plan for our career success.
Too often we are so busy and overwhelmed in the day to day, we don’t make career planning a priority. The eventual cost is feeling your career isn’t on track, and you’re not doing work that fulfills and engages you. Planning now for your future ensures you are ready to capture new opportunities as they come your way – a new job, stepping up to take on a great project, or steering a new initiative – and position yourself for success.
It’s crucial that you find time now to reset and plan for a great 12 months ahead. Don’t worry – it doesn’t take long. By investing 30 minutes to reflect on your career skills and accomplishments, you can then develop a career branding statement that can help you leverage your talents and start attracting work that energizes and engages you.
Getting started:
Identify your Career Accomplishments
Leverage your career by identifying your most satisfying Career Accomplishments. These are the times when you were doing work that truly engaged you and time felt like it was flying. Here’s a question to get you started:
- What are your 3-5 greatest accomplishments in the last 10 years?
Think of these accomplishments as your successes and key achievements – things you are truly proud of. Go deep and consider:
- What issue/problem were you addressing?
- What roadblocks or obstacles did you have to overcome?
- What results or outcomes did you achieve?
- How did you feel afterwards?
Your accomplishments could include: turning around an under-performing team, winning an award, surpassing sales targets, developing new processes, streamlining operations, saving money – to name a few.
Discover your Superpowers
Thriving in your career means knowing your Superpowers and targeting opportunities to invest these skills. To help identify your Superpowers, review your Career Accomplishments with this question in mind:
- What key skills was I using to achieve the results I did?
Make a list of the skills you used to get the results you gained. Some skills to consider include:
- Strategy thinking, visioning, driving results, leading teams, championing change, coaching and developing others, continuous improvement and innovation, customer service, client relations, stakeholder engagement, relationship building, critical decision making, planning and organizing, budgeting, fiscal accountability
Then, narrow this down to your Top 2 to 3 skills that you want to be using going forward in your career.
Need help identifying your key skills? Contact us for a more comprehensive list of Top Skills and Key Differentiators.
Open the door with a Career Branding Statement
Leverage your talents by creating a Career Branding Statement that you can use to communicate who you are (your skills, talents and accomplishments) and your career goal. It should clearly and concisely express how you add-value to organizations, and what roles or opportunities you are targeting. Your Career Branding Statement helps your manager, mentors and network open doors to new opportunities as they understand what skills and talents you want to leverage and what type of work you want to do. Get started by:
- Crafting a Career Branding Statement
Refer to your Career Accomplishments and Superpowers to create a branding statement that describes the type of work you excel at, highlights your top skills and outlines your career goal.
This is an example of an effective CAREER BRANDING STATEMENT: I’ve been heavily involved in leading complex tech projects (Skill #1), and coaching (Skill #2) and turning around under-performing teams (Skill #3). Looking to the next steps in my career, I’m interested in exploring a more senior Project Management role (Career Goal) where I can use these skills on bigger project teams.
In summary, taking the bull by the horns and steering your career is the key to building a rewarding and engaging career that lights you up. It starts now with you determining what you love to do and communicating it to others to help open doors to new opportunities.
What’s one thing you can do – starting this week – to create a more fulfilling and rewarding career?
Need help building your Career Branding Statement?
Contact us! We can help you leverage your career accomplishments to create a compelling Career Brand that will help advance your career.Wishing you much career success!
Joanne Loberg
Certified Executive Coach & Internationally Certified Career Management Professional
JL Careers Inc
